category

category, in logic, a term used to denote the several most general or highest types of thought forms or entities, or to denote any distinction such that, if a form or entity belonging to one category is substituted into a statement in place of one belonging to another, a nonsensical assertion must result.

The term was used by Aristotle to denote a predicate type; i.e., the many things that may be said (or predicated) of a given subject fall into classes—such as quantities, substances, relations, and states—which Aristotle called categories. To the Greeks, the clarification of predicate categories helped resolve questions that seemed to be paradoxes. In the course of a year or so, for example, Socrates could cease to be taller and come to be shorter than Alcibiades; so he is not now what he was at an earlier date. Yet he does not cease to be a human being. One may wonder how he can not be what he used to be (taller) and still be what he used to be (a human being). The answer is that the categories are different: a change of relation is not a change of substance.

Though the Stoics, philosophers of ancient Greece, had recognized only 4 “most generic” notions, Aristotle’s 10 categories were treated throughout the Middle Ages as though they were definitive. In a commentary on Aristotle’s Categoriae (Categories), the Neoplatonist Porphyry set the stage for the entire medieval controversy over universals, or general abstract terms (see Nominalism), and he thus posed the issues that any theory of categories must resolve.

In the 18th century Immanuel Kant revived the term category to designate the different types of judgments or ways in which logical propositions function. It should thus be clear that, whereas Kant retained the Aristotelian term “category” and even some of the subterms, such as “quality,” “quantity,” and “relation,” his distinctions were different from those of Aristotle. For Aristotle, for example, “quality” referred to such predicates as “white” or “sweet,” whereas for Kant it designated the distinction between affirmative and negative.

After Kant, G.W.F. Hegel arranged many categories in a dialectical structure of ascending triads and thus initiated the modern tendency to regard them as many and as comprising the basic principles of a logical and/or metaphysical system; thus, for Hegel the categories encompassed both form and content. Early in the 20th century Bertrand Russell, faced with a “contradiction” in the foundations of mathematics, developed the theory of types, which distinguished different levels of language and held that the levels should not be intermixed.

Meanwhile, Charles Sanders Peirce, an American logician and Pragmatist, arguing from Kant’s categories, proposed a reduced list of categories. He defended the view that there can be three and only three types of predicates: “firstness,” that of “pure possibility”; “secondness,” that of “actual existence”; and “thirdness,” that of “real generality.” Clearly, if universals belong to the category of thirdness, then the Nominalist, who urges that universals have no existence (the secondness category) is confusing categories and, by the definition of “category,” is making a nonsensical statement. Such misjudgments, made famous as “category-mistakes” by Gilbert Ryle, a mid-20th-century Oxford Analytical philosopher, have played an important role in recent linguistic philosophy, which, with its proliferation of categories, has applied this critique, with powerful therapeutic effect, to philosophical discourse.

Stanisław Leśniewski (1886–1939), a Polish logician, and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), a German-American semanticist, distinguished between syntactical categories (dealing with the interrelations of concepts) and semantical categories (dealing with concepts and referents). Distinctions akin to those of Aristotle are thus apt to be described today as semantical, as distinctions between kinds or modes of significance rather than kinds of linguistic expressions or of things or happenings. P.F. Strawson, another Oxford philosopher, discussed the implications of category theory for a descriptive metaphysics.