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Full Idea
We organise our concepts of predicability on a hierarchical tree. At the top are terms like 'interesting', 'exists', 'talked about', which are predicable of anything. At the bottom are names, and in between are predicables of some things and not others.
Gist of Idea
Predicates form a hierarchy, from the most general, down to names at the bottom
Source
Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Category')
Book Ref
'The Old New Logic', ed/tr. Oderberg,David S. [MIT 2005], p.3
A Reaction
The heirarchy seem be arranged simply by the scope of the predicate. 'Tallest' is predicable of anything in principle, but only of a few things in practice. Is 'John Doe' a name? What is 'cosmic' predicable of? Challenging!
| 3300 | Aristotle's logic is based on the subject/predicate distinction, which leads him to substances and properties [Aristotle, by Benardete,JA] |
| 3319 | Frege gives a functional account of predication so that we can dispense with predicates [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| 6076 | For Frege, predicates are names of functions that map objects onto the True and False [Frege, by McGinn] |
| 18894 | Predicates form a hierarchy, from the most general, down to names at the bottom [Sommers] |
| 10615 | The Comprehension Schema says there is a property only had by things satisfying a condition [Smith,P] |
| 15651 | Instead of saying x has a property, we can say a formula is true of x - as long as we have 'true' [Halbach] |