How things are

Aristotle's Categories stands among the earliest and most influential works on the questions this volume takes up. The Greek verb behind his title originally meant to bring a charge against someone in a court of law, and by his time it had come to mean to predicate. Aristotle's predicates are not limited to words. He also counts things like the whiteness of a body or a person's grasp of grammar, which lives in the soul. He applies the terms homonymy and synonymy to things themselves rather than to the words we use about them. Elsewhere in the Organon and the Metaphysics he shows he could separate using a word from mentioning it, so the Categories' lack of focus on that distinction seems deliberate rather than an oversight.

Because predication is ambiguous, the editors treat it as two separate notions and give each a name: linguistic predication and metaphysical predication. The essays that follow, including those by Code and Modrak, apply this distinction to their own problems.