Abstract
In the sentence “Tom sits,” the name distinguishes Tom from anyone else, whereas the predicate assimilates Tom, Theaetetus, and anyone else to whom the predicate applies. The name marks out its bearer and the predicate groups together what it applies to. On that ground, his name is used to trace back Tom, and the predicate is used to describe and classify what it applies to. In both cases, the semantic link is a direct link between expressions and particulars. Here, I will explore the workings of predicative names along the direction just hinted at. The analysis of predication has been less central to philosophical investigation than that of referential expressions. Some problems have concerned the unity of the sentence—what makes us understand “The baby cries” as a sentence rather than a list of words? Other problems have been what a predicate was taken to stand for, properties and relations, and the understanding of either at the ontological level. If a predicate refers to a property or a relation, yet predication, which is central to our understanding of predicates, applies it to one or more particulars. On the background hinted at, these problems might be differently viewed.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, if the predicate “sits” assimilates Tom and Theaetetus, it distinguishes them from Socrates and Theodorus who are standing.
- 2.
- 3.
I am interested in application as a semantic relation different from reference. I am inclined to think that by predicating, we attribute a property to a thing or a relation among n things. But I do not think that is what our semantics involves, and though I believe interesting an investigation on the nature of properties and relations, I think the issue to be a second further topic.
- 4.
As I would prefer to term it, rather than “the unity of the proposition.”
- 5.
Some arguments can be provided for my stand. One, we need language to assess most issues, and any extralinguistic assumption made in fixing the language evades assessment. Two, we master the same language even though some of us believe there to be properties and relations, other people believe there to be only concepts in the common, non-Fregean, understanding, and some other people believe there to be only words and objects. Then, language by itself does not force to choose the ontology we speak of by means of it.
- 6.
We need a language, with a semantics, before running any inquiry, metaphysical or of any other kind. Perhaps, that makes philosophy of language into first philosophy—first in a rather humble sense.
- 7.
A relational predicate marks n-uples of objects. Not to get confused, we may imagine that the mark keeps trace of the n-adicity and of the specificity of the n-uple.
- 8.
Prima facie a predicate describes a thing under an aspect, or classifies the thing by means of an aspect of it.
- 9.
Two side remarks: (1) As the above remark on individual predicates might have suggested, things are pointed out by name as well as by description—“Adelaide’s first child is sleeping”—and are classified by names as well as by comparing them directly with other individuals—as in “She is like Adelaide” or “She is another Adelaide.” Actually, in most cases, the description we successfully use is not an individuating one—“Adelaide’s child is sleeping” very often can do.
(2) A proper name ideally distinguishes a person from anyone else. Actually, there are homonyms. We solve our individuation problems adding other marks, be those other proper names, for example, family names added to first names, or expression built on a predicative core such as a description. We need a balance between being able to finely distinguish what we want to distinguish and use a finite vocabulary.
- 10.
“Is identical to Tom” clearly does apply to only one thing if any.
- 11.
A third-world entity would perhaps offer a better grasp, if it were graspable at all, but its application to standard objects is, as everybody knows, problematic.
- 12.
- 13.
If we know the semantic value of a predicate by means of one or more representatives, our judgments in acknowledging a new element as one to which it applies may vary depending on the different representatives we know that value from. This does not make predicates very different from names. If I had been to London in the 1960s and you 5 years ago, I may claim a picture from London not to be one and you argue it is, or vice versa.
- 14.
For a different stand, meticulously argued for, see Fara (2011).
- 15.
One of my readers, the most competent, raised a quibble here about me insisting that a predicate classifies, suggesting that “sits” or “is red” does not classify. My reply is that I can classify some objects in my office as “books,” and then classify the books as red, blue, yellow, etc., and classify the three people in my office as sitting or as standing. If a predicate marks together what it applies to, it classifies.
I claim also that predicates describe. There is a preferential understanding of description as a perceptual description, but here I have no preferences. I can say that Giorgio obsesses with money, and that seems a nonperceptual description.
- 16.
If we are inclined to see a concept as a property or a relation, since these can also be taken as the denotation of the nominal developed out of a predicate, and hence an object, better say that a concept is, with an ugly phrase and a neologism, a properting property or a relating relation. Object and concept, Frege repeatedly reminds us, are never to be confused.
- 17.
I think defining a predicate’s semantics positing a concept conflates truth and reality—inasmuch as our representations are true, they represent reality.
- 18.
Are actual and possible worlds things? Possibly they are not, see Jubien (1991).
- 19.
Dummett (1973) seems to attribute an analogous view to Frege.
- 20.
A second quibble of my most competent reader is that we can grasp truth not only by grasping reference and predication but also by grasping assertions, suggesting the case of impersonal sentences such as “It’s raining.”
“Is raining” is a predicate, and the dummy “it” offers an impersonal reference to which that predicate is applied.
The sentence “It’s raining” describes an event as one of the rain kind. We do not think that there is an object suffering the change—such as a river overflowing or a volcano erupting—nor an agent causing it—such as a boy breaking the window while playing soccer in the courtyard. The clouds which become rain thereby cease to exist.
- 21.
Though Bloom requires too much (entities, properties, events, and processes, besides objects).
- 22.
Kripke makes the use of the truth predicate dependent on mastering of the language.
- 23.
With language, there is no priority between meaning and matter of fact.
- 24.
Of course, there is also (urban) planning, which goes the other way, drawing a map and fitting the territory to it. Yet planning is more limited, and the action has to take care of the environment of the planning and on how it will react to our acting on it.
The disproportion between map and territory is clear when we consider that the map is itself an element of the territory. The map codes our knowledge of the territory in going through it.
- 25.
On the difference between “precision” and “exactness,” see Austin (1962, pp. 127–128), and on accuracy, see Austin (pp. 128–129). Sometimes to get the general shape, however, we need to give up precision.
- 26.
Already denying the application of a predicate goes in this direction, preferring exactness over precision.
- 27.
Instead, language transfers information of any kind, though coding linguistically visual information, it is of course much less efficient in transferring this kind of information than a picture or a video is.
Language, as the other means, is used also for informing of things and events to come. In such a case, we may resort to an illocutionary act which is not an expositive in Austin’s terminology, but a verdictive or a commissive.
- 28.
The house and the car are mine. The ownership in the end come out by literally classifying, on paper, the two things by words that amount more or less to Paolo’s property.
- 29.
Davidson discusses repeatedly interrogatives, imperatives, and other nonassertive cases. There are harder cases, for instance verdictives, like assessments, and exercitives, like appointments. Davidson never touches on performative properties and relations. He is dismissive also of fictional cases and the like, claiming that they are parasitic on standard cases. Maybe, but when we imagine a far-fetched situation, of which we wonder whether it is a possible or an impossible one, it is not clear to me that they are parasitic on true cases.
- 30.
There are other arguments for taking holding true as not sufficient for accounting for meaning. (a) There are many speech acts, which do not claim anything, like directives and questions, and I do not think that all speech acts can be reduced to expositives as somehow Davidson (1979) suggests. (b) Paradoxes show us to be not in control of the expressive power of the language. Though each part of what we say is meaningful, we cannot tell whether the paradoxical sentence is true or false, and not even without a truth-value.
Besides, if it is wrong what I maintain above (see fn 10), any new meaningful sentence can be either true or false, and I do not see how we could get the meaning of the false ones following Davidson.
- 31.
The need of coordinating language and things can be better appreciated comparing linguistic with pictorial representation. A basic point is that language does not picture things. Otto Neurath, who devised an International Picture Language in the 1930s, writes: “The man has two legs; the picture-sign has two leg[-sign]s; but the word-sign ‘man’ has not two legs” (1936, p. 20). This is a basic and underevaluated feature of language.
- 32.
In On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to hold this view.
- 33.
This is true more of predicates than of names. If it were not names would not perform their distinctive task.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter, as all the chapters in this collection, is dedicated to Kevin Mulligan, whom I met the first time in Freiburg, Germany, just when he was moving to Geneva. Kevin contributed to turn Geneva’s into the best philosophy department on continental Europe, influencing the work of most of us analytic Europeans on the Continent. Reflective and passionate he was then, and always later.
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Leonardi, P. (2014). Predication. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04199-5_13
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