ABSTRACT
Doing what Wittgenstein did in summer 1912 will not do us any harm. So let us brood upon the structure and content of elementary predications. The declarative sentence
(E) Socrates is courageous
consists, as philosophers have known for a long time, of a singular term, the name of good old Socrates, and a predicate, full stop. Well, it is not for such a long time that philosophers have known this. Before Frege they kept on saying for many centuries that sentences like (E) consisted of three components: a subject, a copula and a predicate. Obviously ‘predicate’ is used differently in these descriptions of sentential structure. According to the Fregean conception of a predicate, which I endorse, you extract a predicate from a sentence that contains at least one name (singular term) by deleting at least one name-occurrence. Thus understood, predicates are sentence-forming operators on singular terms, and the copula ‘is’ is part of some of these operators. Notice that this is a far cry from the claim, upheld by at least one important post-Fregean philosopher, that the word ‘is’ occurs in a predicate in the same way as its echo occurs in the word ‘Islam’, as a fragment of a semantically seamless whole.
