Aristotle’s Conception Of Predication

This paper is aimed to study the origin, nature, scope, type and the systematicrole of Aristotle’s conception of predication in his metaphysics. The first part dealswith the linguistic and philosophical foundations of the origin of Aristotle’sconception of predication. In Sophist Plato discriminates name in its narrow sense(noun) and verb within name in its broad sense, and he thinks that name and verb areboth necessary and sufficient conditions for forming speech (statement) of bothmeaning and truth value. It lays the foundation for the division between subjectexpression and predicate expression, and the asymmetry between the semanticsaturatedness of name and the semantic unsaturatedness of verb anticipates thatbetween subject and predicate in Aristotle’s metaphysics. In his middle dialoguesPlato is concerned with the phenomena “one name shared by many things” and offershis explanation based on theory of Form. He holds that Forms deserve its name in theoriginal sense while the particulars can be called by a name, by their partaking Forms,in the derivative sense. Therefore, Plato only allows the narrow self-predicationformulated as “F is F”. In his late dialogues, however, Plato objects to this narrowtheory of calling-by-name. He attempts to explain the phenomena “one thing calledby many names”. By appeal to the doctrine of communion of Forms, Plato explainshow one thing can participate several mutually compatible Kinds and thereby possiblybe called by many names. Only by this means could he include all names and allspeeches formulated as “S is P” under this explanation of theory of Forms. InCategories Aristotle makes a further distinction between “homonym” and “synonym”in the phenomena “called by the same name”, stressing the importance of the namesof species and genus and their qualitative difference from the names of secondarycategories.The second part accounts for the pivotal role of Aristotle’s conception ofpredication in his enterprise of metaphysics. If the theory of calling-by-name founded by Plato could be regarded as the study of the relations of names to things and theirmetaphysical foundations, then Aristotle’s conception of predication directly orientsitself to the ontological relations between things that are. For Aristotle predication isnothing more than a conception of the ontologically asymmetrical relation of subjectto predicate. In Categories predication serves as a test for determining the ontologicaltypes of things. Aristotle draws a distinction between said-of predication and inpredication, which determines respectively, substance and accident on the one hand,and particular and universal on the other hand. Thereby, he reduces everything intofour ontological types: particular substance, universal substance, particular accidentand universal accident. Due to the internal inconsistency of the individual substanceas primary substance, in Metaphysics Aristotle introduces a new type of predication,namely, form-predication, and establishes what-it-is (essence) as the primarysubstance. On the one hand, in this process the previous predication test for producingthe ontological types breaks down, while, on the other hand, form-predication plays agrounding role by explaining why predicate could possibly predicated of subject byvirtue of hylomorphical model. Therefore, may it be in Categories or in Metaphysics,the conception of predication is central to Aristotle’s enterprise of metaphysics.