The Brain, a User's Manual:
How to Talk About Things—Part One
By Gabriel Blanchard
We've seen this painting of the School of Athens several times here on the Journal; what are those old guys doing, anyway?
How to Say Things, Allegedly
Last week, we talked about how to define words well, since definition is the first step in literally knowing what we are talking about. The next question sounds a little stupid, but we can only be sure we’re being thorough if we plod, so plod we must: what kinds of talking are there?
As usual, Aristotle beat us to the punch. It’s so typical of him, taking unfair advantage of merely having been born ±2,375 before ourselves to get to all the juicy questions first. On the plus side, we can now nick his answers. Those answers are in one of the six parts of his work on logic—a work known as the Organon, a word roughly meaning “the Toolbox.” The relevant subdivision is called the Categoriæ,* which means “Allegations” (with the suggestion of law courts that that word carries). Categories, in the logical sense, are the sorts of things that can be alleged.
What We’re Not Here to Do
One word of caution before we properly begin. This user’s manual is for anyone who wishes to operate their brain logically, i.e. without breaking it. It is not meant to teach any one school of philosophy, as if that were the same thing as logic. The present author has many philosophical opinions, and for those who don’t like them, he is sure to have more opinions which they will dislike much worse. But those are all beside the point here. To compose a philosophical tract and advertise it as a guide to logic would (in one of his opinions) be a kind of theft.
All the same, a few of the technical terms that come up in several philosophies do inevitably also come up here, when we are still merely describing and not yet arguing. This is normal. It is not an intrusion of philosophy onto logic, any more than finding out that maths are involved in studying the sciences means science is intruding on numbers. Philosophy makes use of the ideas it learns from logic, but those uses are philosophy’s business. In logic’s own domain, it is enough just to grasp what these ideas are.
Simplicity and Composition
Before fleshing out the categories proper, Aristotle laid the groundwork with a few other things: for instance, the differentiation of homonyms, and the relationship between terms that are derived from one another (the verb derive and the related nouns deriver** and derivation being a handy example). Most importantly, he explained the difference between simple and composite forms of speech.
Simple forms of speech are single words, like “blue” or “dragon.” They express a singular, coherent idea—only one, of whatever kind. They are not so much communication as the building blocks of communication.
Composite forms of speech combine at least two ideas, as in “a blue dragon.” Complete sentences,† as we call them, are one kind of composite statement, and it is only a complete sentence that can be true or false. For example, you can say that the sentence “All dragons are blue” is false, either because some of them (like the Welsh dragon) are not blue or because dragons don’t exist. But you couldn’t really call the word “dragon” false; that’s not how words work.
Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge—nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for ... out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art.
The Allegations
As for categories proper, Aristotle listed ten of them. We won’t be following his enumeration exactly, but we’ll be pretty close to it, so it is worthwhile to give his list of ten:
- Substance or essence
- Quantity
- Quality
- Relation
- Place
- Time
- Posture or position
- Condition or state
- Activity
- Affectedness
These ten ideas, plus a few subsets and so on, are the lot. We’ll discuss just one of these today, and leave the rest for our next two installments.
Substance/Essence
Substance has become a slightly tricky word. Today it’s usually a synonym for “material” or “stuff,” as in “This cup is full of a reddish, liquid substance”; if pressed to be more specific, most people’s minds would go toward chemistry. But if a Medieval philosopher dropped by and wanted to know whether the substance in the cup were wine or the Blessed Sacrament, he would be asking about a metaphysical reality—a question chemistry in itself could not answer, for the same reason chemistry in itself cannot explain the difference between “a given mass of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a few other elements” and “a human being.” (Most chemists could probably explain that difference, though maybe not as well as most Medieval philosophers; the point is that they would need do so by drawing on their knowledge of things other than chemistry.) To those readers who’ve been wondering why we don’t just use essence, if people get so fluffed up and unnecessary about it, well, like Tevye the dairyman, I’ll tell you: I don’t know.‡ But it is less usual.
In any event, Aristotle distinguished two varieties of substances that we can talk about.
- What Aristotle called primary substances, or individual things. Aristotle, for instance, was a primary substance. These things can be conceptual, like the Welsh dragon mentioned above; the point is that they are individual things, rather than kinds of things.
- Secondary substances are just that—kinds of things. The secondary substance to which Aristotle belongs is “human,” while the Welsh dragon belongs to at least two secondary substances, “dragon” and “sign.”
We can allege things from the other nine categories about both primary and secondary substances. They are basically the same class as “things that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence”: in other words, nouns. So, now that we have things and can make composite forms of speech about them, let’s get to some alleging.
*This, of course, is a Latinized spelling of the completely different Greek title, Κατηγορίαι [Katēgoriai].
**Sadly, the hit film Deriving Miss Daisy (in which an elderly Southern woman and her African-American chauffeur teach the audience mastery of informal logic over ninety-nine minutes) has never existed, creating the need for this series.
†The phrase “complete sentence” is, stealthily, very appropriate: “Sentence” comes from the Latin term sententia, which means “thought” or “opinion.”
‡There are some schools of philosophy, such as Thomism and Sartrean Existentialism, that use “essence” in a technical sense. This may, for all the present author knows, be the whole reason.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the Journal. If you’d like to see more of what we have to offer, check out some of our author profiles or introductions to the great ideas—we have posts on writers from Thucydides and Dante to Hume and Douglass, and from beauty to law to war and peace. You might also enjoy our Texts in Context series, an introduction to Western history that provides the setting to understand the men and women (and anonymous works) of our Author Bank. And don’t miss the official CLT podcast, Anchored.
Published on 17th October, 2024. Page image of The School of Athens (1511), a fresco painted by Raphael, located in the Stanza della Segnatura. At the time, this was the meeting room of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura (the highest court of the Roman Catholic Church, subject only to the Pope); the room and its frescoes are now part of the Vatican Museum. The central figures in the fresco are Plato and Aristotle. The venerable Plato is on the left, clad in purple and pink (colors associated with royalty and innocence), holding a copy of his dialogue Timæus, which discusses the creation of the world, and pointing heavenward as if toward the exalted realm of the Forms; the younger Aristotle is on the right, dressed in brown and blue (the colors of the earth and sea), holding a copy of his Ethics in front of him, and gesturing downward as if toward the realm of practical affairs. Some of the surrounding figures in the painting have also been identified—for example, the mustachioed man lower down on the far left in a green tunic and white turban is thought to be Averroës, and the bearded, bald man over whose shoulder he is reading is believed to be Pythagoras.