PART TWO THE MISREPRESENTATION  OF *IS* AS  A CLASSIFICATORY NODE OF PREDICATION

Abstract.

This paper rejects the doctrine that In the English language /be/ is a verb that has several distinct functions in addition to confirming the number, past, present or durative distinctions of time in relation to the subject. Unlike the word *exists,* which operates as a means of distinguishing ontological fact from fiction, reality from both illusion and hallucination and denotes that spatial and temporal considerations are applicable, /be/ acts as a mute, empty deictic pointer to indicate the predicate being no more than a lexical arrow bereft of any predicational content whatsoever.

The Predicational Misrepresentation of IS.

I refuse to accept the belief that the word *is*  contains determinants of the predicate which inhere within it as a form of connotative nominal, adjectival, verbal, locative and existential semantic content as expressed in the following standard examples:

	Is  of Identity	noun is noun	The cat is an animal
	Is  of Predication	noun is adjective	The cat is furry
	Is  of Continuity	noun is verb	The cat is sleeping
	Is  of Location	noun is place	The cat is on the mat
	Is  of Existence	is  noun	There is a cat

I assert that in the above examples the *is* an unchanging inarticulate symbol and it is wrongful to identify the copula as a semantic node upon which to hang the classifications of the variant predicational types, for it is the existential modalities which furnish the predicative stereotypes –  not the neutral deictic indicant device that points to such modification.

I am satisfied  that the classical, Fregean and Russellian  identification of *is* as the semantic node upon which sentences are classified into types of predicates is both a misrepresentation of the sentential role of *is* (be) and at the same time wrongfully identifies the indicant *is* as a classificatory element or node involved in the descriptive indexing of differential forms of sentential predication. 

Frege

My criticism of Frege lies not so much with his system of truth-functional connectives, but rather in his misplaced choice and appointment of the indicant *is*  to function as an associative focus or classificatory node by which predicate types are described.  Such recursive associative characterisation of the indicant  *is*  by the  attribution of predicational descriptive functions such as: THE IS OF PREDICATION, THE IS OF CONTINUITY,  THE IS OF EXISTENCE, THE IS OF  LOCATION AND THE IS OF  IDENTITY, is a misrepresentation.

 For much of the tradition simple identity statements like: *John is Betty's father,*  and supposedly puzzling examples like: * the morning star is identical to the evening star,*  in which the descriptions the morning star and the evening star denote the same planet, namely Venus, but express different ways of conceiving of Venus and so have different senses,  are explained as being *is of  identity statements* not by analysing what the predicate describes, but by gratuitously dubbing the innocent *is* as *the is of identity, when *is* is simply pointing to the predicate in the same way it does with any form of predicate.

As with: *Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens.*  etc.,  the implication is that for some reason the fact that the indicant *is* happens to appear in such a sentence,  it has automatically been infused with some mysterious essence of meaning (Bedeutung)  which empowers it to impart or endow the morning star and the evening star and Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens with the existential modality of  identicalness.   In all such identity statements the indicant *is* (which remains in its symbolic morphological form confirming the number and tense of the subject WHATEVER type of predication takes place in the sentence,  is magically invested and dubbed by Frege and others as:  *The *is* of identity.*  As Vilkko and Hintikka have observed:

 

One of the characteristic features of contemporary logic is that it incorporates the Frege-Russell thesis according to which verbs for being are multiply-ambiguous. This thesis was not accepted before the nineteenth century. In Aristotle existence could not serve alone as a predicate term. However, it could be a part of the force of the predicate term, depending on the context. For Kant existence could not even be a part of the force of the predicate term. Hence, after Kant, existence was left homeless. It found a home in the algebra of logic in which the operators corresponding to universal and particular judgments were treated as duals, and universal judgments were taken to be relative to some universe of discourse. Because of the duality, existential quantifier expressions came to express existence. The orphaned notion of existence thus found a new home in the existential quantifier. [1] (Vilkko and Hintikka. abstract.)

  I further assert that this mistaken interpretation of *is* has wrought a profoundly malignant effect on all aspects of human discourse,  both in the sciences and in the arts.  To include the  copula *is* (including its conjugates) as a part of the predicate is a cardinal error - for the symbol  *is*   does not influence the predicate in any way whatsoever.

Whether such predication describes an area of sea as being inhabited by whales, or whether it is predicatively reported that black swans exist in Australia, or the cat is black, or the cat is called tiddles, or the morning star is the evening star - all such varieties of descriptive predication have nothing at all to do with the vacuous, non-predicative, arrow-dressed-as-a-word: *is.*

Historically, the blame for the infusion of such ontological travesties must be laid firmly at the door of religion, and transcendentalism, for  theological and transcendental proofs rely on the assumption that *is* is a viable verb which is  completely meaningful by itself,  which, even when bereft of any supplementary meaning provided by a predicate concept can be employed to generate ontological outlandishness like the predicational truncation: *God is.*

The Basics.

In reading a sentence there is first the  sentential subject name and with it the sense of the name as a conscious general awareness formed from the accessed memorised information stored in the brain. Thus confronted with a sentence beginning: *my father*  the concept of what constitutes a *father* and what *fatherhood* implies together with  a notion of the class of things that have this exist in this modality is conceptually instantiated in the mind of the reader. 

Such a conceptual instantiation can be described as a private, internal, de facto creation of a covert, unique, descriptive predicate formed in the mind of the reader even before the eye reaches the sentential predicate and exposed to the  usually more restrictive and focussed form of predication which describes selected aspects of the existential modality of the father referred to in the narrative. Thus the reader himself decides whether the subject is justified in being conceptual instantiated purely as an abstract idea or  conceptualised as an entity capable of ideational existentialisation. The effect of this is to render any claim that  *is* acts as an existential instantiator  utterly redundant.


 So sentential predicates differ fundamentally from general default privately cached  template-predicates, both in the specificity of their focusing on one descriptive existential domain (*the cat is black,* or *my father is a bus-conductor* or Jack is Jean's uncle ) and also by  virtue of the multiplicity of possible variables inherent in the  plethora of predicational extensions.

The observance that sentences consist of a subject and a predicate can be traced back to Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Historically the Aristotelian term predicate had the sense of consisting of what remains of a sentential or clausal string when its subject is removed. Metaphorically in this filleted Aristotelian version of predication, the predicate is defined as what is left of the eel-like sentence after the subject (head) has been removed. In this sense the subject is separate from the Aristotelian predicate and combines with it independently of what propositional semantic significations may come its way regarding what may be claimed of it  - or attributed to it.  

Descriptively, for the purposes of parsing,  the subject is independent of the Aristotelian predicate (of which there are countless possible variations)  with which it combines independently of semantic considerations.


Unfortunately for ontology Frege wrongfully recognised be as a verb and included be and its conjugates  as members of his elect band of lexical licentiates.

        1. a subject +  2. what is licensed by *is * 3.  to be predicationally said of that subject

For Frege, Aristotle’s simple put-and-take-subject and predicational leftover type of analysis is too simplistic, and is no more that a basic division of a latently more sophisticated series of  syntactical divergency. For Frege, not only can we strip away the subject leaving the Aristotelian predicate, it is also possible to go further and disinvest more predicative arguments from the Aristotelian predicate until one is left with a single lexical item, the core Fregean predicate.  But although Frege’s conceptual notation includes an radical revaluation of the grammatical role of the indicant  (copula) he  unwisely continued to accept and define *exist* and *there are*  as natural language intransitive verbs.

A heightened understanding of exists or is  has  radical consequences for philosophical issues involving the existence of individual objects or classes of objects, and it is equally consequential for attempts at theological proofs that assume that  is  acts as a verb is and completely meaningful by itself, bereft of any supplementary meaning provided by a predicate concept in curious formations like *God is.*   or  *The Mountains of Mourne are.*

Aristotelian predicates are recursive categories. Fregean predicates, on the other hand, recursively endow the copula to incorporate the catorgorised semantic nuances of the predicate.

 Hegel's argument in this portion his Logic depends throughout upon confusing the is of predication, as in Socrates is mortal , with the is of identity, as in Socrates is the philosopher who drank the hemlock . Owing to this confusion, he thinks that Socrates and mortal must be identical. Seeing that they are different, he does not infer, as others would, that there is a mistake somewhere, but that they exhibit identity in difference. Again, Socrates is particular, mortal is universal. Therefore, he says, since Socrates is mortal, it follows that the particular is the universal-- taking the is to be throughout expressive of identity. But to say the particular is the universal . [2] (Russell. 1914. p.42)

Sadly, although Russell rightly identifies Hegel's mistake, he himself errs by referring to *is* as being capable of being expressive of anything other than (as copulas do) the agreement involved  in confirming Plato's singularity and anchoring the supposed contemporaneity  of the sentence as *is* rather than *was.*

My position is that neither Hegel nor Russell  realised that it  is the PREDICATION  which changes  and should be classified into various descriptive types - NOT the copula.
*IS*  does not (in its vacuous self) signal anything at all - it just points:

WHATEVER Predicate Type is involved. 1. *The tree (indicator-is) -- fill in desired predicate. 2. *The tree (indicator-is) -- in the garden. 3. *The tree (indicator-is) -- standing in the garden. 4. *The tree (indicator-is -- known as:  *Robin's Oak.* 5. *The tree (indicator-is) -- in the far corner of the field.

Apart from changing its form to accommodate the number and tense of the subject (*is* to *are* etc) The  copular (indicant)   *is* (in all conjugal forms) remains EXACTLY the same

So with reference to the classical mistake of  inauthentically classifying predicates by transmitting the nature of the predicational modality back to the copula, thereby associating and attributing mystic modes of identity, location and existence  and other imperatival of modality to *is*   contrary to what is the ontological and semantic case, surely it is time that we set about classifying the predicates themselves. I end by leaving Prof. Jack Kaminsky of the State University of New York  to comment on the need for an more organised form of predicational classification:

But what does suggest itself here is that perhaps some very obvious fact about predicates has been overlooked, namely, that technically we have no right to speak of predicates unless we have some way of categorizing these predicates. [4] ( Kaminsky. 1969. p. 203)