ABSTRACT
Logic seemed to deal at once with language, with thought and with reality. Aristotle himself, in his main discussions of predication, had moved freely between the linguistic and the ontological modes, writing sometimes of the combination of words or expressions in sentences but at other times of the association of things or entities in an act of predication. We are told, for example, that expressions must be combined, and that the combination must at least implicitly include a verb (paradigmatically the copula) before something capable of truth or falsity comes into existence.17 On the other hand, one thing (an attribute) may be said or predicated or affirmed of another thing, which is the subject (and paradigmatically a substance – 'substances' are 'things' in a narrower or stronger sense, comprising men, horses, axes and the like, as well as such stuffs as gold and water.) The Greek word 'kategoria' can be taken to mean 'predicate', but the famous list of ten categories or 'predicaments' (i.e. in the language of the early English logics: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, habit, action and affection) was regarded as a classification of things or beings or objects of thought, as much as of expressions. The equally famous characterization of 'accidents' as those things which exist 'in' a subject also concerns
things as they are designated by words: as we shall see, it is an intuitive ontological criterion with which other, seemingly more linguistic, criteria can be correlated.18 But there is also for Aristotle a further level to which logic relates, the level of thought, or that which corresponds in the mind to both words and things, and which does not differ from person to person as language may differ between people of different nations.19
