ABSTRACT
The initial unclarity about the limits of the two great categories of general and particular shows itself also in that arbitrary narrowing of the field which must be presumed to occur whenever certain answers to our question seem plausible. This chapter considers again some of these answers, which were dismissed by Ayer or Ramsey or both, not so much on the ground that they thought them false as on the ground that they did not think them fundamental. There is, for example, the suggestion that general, unlike particular, things cannot be perceived by means of the senses; and this seems most plausible if one is thinking of the things designated by certain abstract nouns. A doctrine which might appear more promising, because more general, than these, is that individuals can function in propositions only as subjects, never as predicates; whereas general things can function as both.
