ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relevance of Michael Durrant's work to philosophical logic and the philosophy of language. Since at least the work of Gottlob Frege, philosophers have held that descriptive or fact-stating language is comprised of two basic categories of logical symbols, namely: names and predicates. One of the most novel aspects of Durrant's work herein is his challenge to this dogma. The central contention of Sortals and the Subject-Predicate Distinction is that there are, in fact, three categories of logical symbol involved, that is, in addition to names and predicates, there are sortals which, it is rightly held, cannot be reduced to either of the aforementioned categories. Thus, with the intervention of sortals, the chapter presents with a category of terms which have the capacity to endow speakers with the ability to identify or pick out objects.
