The Linguistic Metaphysics of Everett W. Hall

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY FALL, 1965

REVIEW

The Linguistic Metaphysics of Everett W . Hall’ ROMANE CLARK

Duke University

CATEGORIAL ANALYSIS: Selected essays of Everett W . Hull, edited by E. M. Adams, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1964. Pp. vii + 347.

The late Everett Hall (1901-60) left five books, nearly fifty published articles, and a number of unpublished pa- pers. From among the published and unpublished writings Professor Adams has selected a group which contain evidence of the intellectual vigor and honesty of their author. A rare com- bination of virtues appear. Hall was not afraid of appearing old-fashioned although he was a knowing critic of contemporary analysis. He was not afraid of appearing ridiculous in pur- suing the consequences of his views. He knew that intellectual timidity is intellectual dishonesty. There is in these essays insight to be gained into their author. There is also insight to be gained into his views. These essays are, I believe, the fairest, most readable, and most instructive presentation avail- able of his thought. T h e y bring understanding to his books. Even so this volume can be recommended to a general philosophical audience only if it speaks responsibly of philosophical issues and arguments. I t does so in an impressive way. The volume contains radical ideas, provocative suggestions, and incisive criticisms of the contemporary scene. There is much to learn from it.

I The essays cover a range of topics

and extend through a period of years. The earliest of the essays was published in 1939, “A Realistic Theory of Distor- tion”. The latest of them appeared posthumously in 1962, “My Possession of My Experiences”. A dozen of the essays have never been published before. Many are polemical, answering critics or criticizing others. A few are

“popular”, addressed to the intelligent and interested layman; most are for the professional philosopher.

Given this, there are many ways in which the essays selected might have been grouped. And there remains the question : Why this selection? The answer lies in the fact that Hall was a systematic philosopher. He was concerned to investigate and propound a conceptual system inclusive enough to characterize the main areas of ex- perience and knowledge, including one’s own philosophizing about such areas and knowledge. This unfashionable concern of Hall’s is reflected in the book’s title and his phrase “categorial analysis”. Adams selected from Hall’s writings essays which reflect his systematic concerns, which give evidence of the way in which his investigations fit together and are motivated by his general conception of philosophy, and, finally, essays which give evidence of his critical and analytical abilities.

Given the selection of essays, Adams has grouped them into three parts. Part I is entitled “The Philosophical Enter- prise.” This contains essays concerned with the nature of philosophy and of philosophical systems. It is against this group of essays that the remainder of the work must be balanced, for these set forth his conception of what the individual attempts in the remaining parts are ultimately all about and how they are related to one another. The other parts contain essays in categorial analysis; the first part contains essays concerning philosophical analysis. Some of the essays of Part I anticipate his book Philosophical Systems; others are

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polemics against the Oxford style of philosophizing or specific criticisms of specific Oxonian writings. These last belong to the contemporary Anglo- American philosophical scene. Hall was very critical of much recent philosophical writing. But he did not disdain or withdraw from philosophical exchange. His views bear the marks of life in a hostile terrain.

Part 11, entitled “Ethics and Values,” contains essays in value theory together with criticisms of others and responses to the criticisms of others. Hall here anticipates his unique and radical ethi- cal objectivistism which he developed in detail in What Is Value?’ Although he was in a special sense an objectivist, Hall was also an empiricist in value theory. In “The Empirical Justifiability of Valuative Sentences,” he argues that emotions and patterns of the occur- rences of emotions and attitudinal responses provide the empirical ground for value judgments. This unpublished essay throws helpful light on his recent book, Our Knowledge of Fact and Value. Together with the essays en- tered under the item “Analysis of Value Sentences,” it provides an instance of categorial analysis at Hall’s best. In ad- dition, some of his best polemical and critical writing appears in this part. “The ‘Proof‘ of Utility in Bentharn and Mill” ; “Stevenson on Disagreement in Attitude”; and suggestive replies to Adams on the nature of “ought” occur in Part 11.

Part 111, “Knowledge, Language, and the Mind,” is a more scattered, less developed, group of essays reflect- ing remaining areas of his interest and writing. The volume is capped with a list of Hall’s published works. In all, it is a fine collection of Hall’s essays, felicitously selected and grouped.

I1 There are more than thirty essays,

some very short, in this book. One, “The Forms of Sentences and the Di- mensions of Reality”’ (1946) of Part I, lies at the center. It, perhaps more

than any other, provides understanding of the motivation and development of Hall’s thought in his other essays and in his later books. I shall consider this previously unpublished essay at some length. Doing so, I run the risk of misrepresenting the range and detail of the collection. Most especially, there will be missing a sense of his critical and polemical writings. He was an able critic, with trenchant things to say about contemporary Oxonian philosophy.

Everett Hall maintained that the structures of sentences reveal categorial features of reality. They reveal, that is, the main categories of what there is. This view, reminiscent of Wittenstein’s Tractatus, is neither obvious nor fashionable today and it is susceptible of more and of less reason- able interpretations. For one thing, there is a good deal of fussing to be done here with “main” as well as with “category”, but that had best wait. Among other things, there is on the one hand a widely shared and vaguely held view that predication reveals something about what there is and the way in which it is. But on the other hand there is also a rather vague sense that whatever there may be is in principle nameable. Hall sought to make clearer a sense in which the former is true. In doing so he rejected the latter. It is hard to adequately convey how very shocking and radical his be- liefs often were.

In “Forms” Hall considers certain declarative “styles of predication,” ways in which we join in language the names of the objects to which we refer and the predicates we use to ascribe to those objects that which we assert of them. The essential thing for Hall is that not only names and predicates are revelant in indicating in their different ways what there is, but SO too are the various sentential forms by which we say what is the case, or say what ought to be the case, and so on. What Is Value? might be described


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as a book-length argument devoted to establishing that in the sense in which there are facts there also are values. The present essay however is a shorter argument which attempts to distinguish four basic types of predication disguised in English by the use of the declarative copuIa alone.

Hall writes: I t is the contention of this paper that predication in everyday language functions in several radically different ways, that these different ways are easily distinguishable by anyone who has a sense for common usage, and that, when differentiated clearly by setting up a normal form sentence for each, they reveal basic dimensions of reality . . . common speech has embedded in it a distinguishable variety of forms of assertion or predication and . . . it is the business of any commonsense philosopher to bring this variety to light. (Pp. 70, 71.) The four forms of predication which

Hall distinguishes are “the descriptive declarative,’’ “the revelatory declarative,” “the value declarative,” and “the semiotic declarative.” The first of these, the descriptive declarative, reveals what Hall calls “characterizing tie.” It is the form of predication exemplified in the assertion that John is tall. In general, it is the form used in asserting that an individual is characterized by a quality or that individuals stand in a given relation.

I t is not clear, or at any rate it is not clear to me, whether this form of predication is restricted to particulars, individuals with (at least) spatial- temporal locations, on the one hand, and to qualities or literal characteristics of things on the other hand. (A thing is called, but not characterized, a horse, for example, and it has, but is not characteiized by, a certain nature. And so on.) These are not triv- ial points. Hall does little to say exactly what the nature of the characterizing tie is and between what it holds. He

seems almost to’assume that this form of predication is quite clear and com- monly accepted and that the problem is to distinguish the other forms from it. And in fact, most of our understanding of the characterizing tie comes from the contrast between it and the other forms. But, clearly, there are in everyday speech many different kinds of things which one says of an individual, or even of a particular. And clearly, not all of these are ways in which we characterize the individual in question; some serve to classify it, others to identify it, others to explicate its nature or its tendencies. And some of these things we sometimes say of an individual fail to exemplify the points of contrast which Hall finds between descriptive and other forms of predication. For example, the predicates of taxonomy are neither adven- titously nor temporally related to that to which they are correctly applied. Yet it is a characteristic of the characterizing tie as Hall finds it that it is essentially temporal and that assertions of descriptive declaratives are always contingent. It appears then that we are committed to understanding the descriptive declarative as a categorical sentence which predicates a (sense?) quality of a particular.‘ This conforms to Hall’s general discussion and examples. For the rest, there merely remains a richness of expression which is quite compatible with the general account Hall gives although Hall did not here exploit the fact. There is no difficulty in this save for the nagging unclarity as to just which distinctions one should attend in doing what Hall does, and the need to understand the term “descriptive declarative” as he does.

That a descriptive declarative sentence can and must have just one of a pair of truth-values is for Hall a semantical reflection of the nature of characterizing tie. Not every form of predication carries this feature, as he argues later. As a corollary, that each such sentence has a unique negation

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and that the law of excluded middle applies to them further distinguishes this form of predication from others on Hall’s view. That a thing has or lackss a quality is not a further characteristic of the thing although that it does so is a fact about the way the world is. These cryptic and suggestive remarks concerning the characterizing tie lead Hall to a brief and interesting digres- sion: Hall is forced, not by the implicit grammar of descriptive dedaratives themselves, but by his acceptance of the ontology which seems consequent upon his analysis of those declaratives, to face the traditional puzzles of substance, change, and realism with respect to properties. He appears to em- brace something like Aristotelian realism with respect to properties and a “bundle theory” of thing-hood. The interesting fact is that his metaphysical stance at this point is not dictated by the forms of commonsense thought. I t is self-consciously assumed as an intellectual palliative. Universals and substances there may be, but no self- existent unchanging substances and universals, and no necessary matters of fact.

Characterization, we noted, is largely to be understood in Hall’s account by its contrast with other declarative forms of predication. He calls those sentences whose subject is itself a property “revelatory declarative sentences.” The relation of predicate to subject exhibits “the characteral tie.” As before, it is not clear exactly what the range of instances may be which the revelatory declarative comprehends. Hall’s examples are “Before is a relation,” “Gray is between white and bIack,” “Red is a coIor.” As before, I shall assume that Hall intends this form to be restricted to sentences the subjects of which are expressions for qualities (or “simple relations” which obtain among particulars). It is not obvious that this is the correct interpretation for he does mention briefly a case involving a common noun as subject. But these other forms of sentence are very diffi-

cult and the matter is very complex beyond the resources of this review to state adequately and subtle beyond the broad strokes Hall draws to develop his theme of the existence of styles of predication. There are, for example, many abstractive operators by which we in English explicitly or tacitly create a singular referring expression of the various predicate forms-verb, adjective, common noun, and so on. To the common noun ‘man’ we have a cluster of singular terms like ‘manhood,’ ‘mankind,’ ‘humanity’; to others, say ‘whale,’ we have the abstractive ‘the’ in ‘The whale is . . . ’; the plural in ‘Whales are . . . .’ I t does not seem to me that the things Hall sketches out for characteral assertions apply to the range of these many forms. Ac- cordingly, I assume that sentences ex- hibiting the characteral tie are restricted to those whose subject is a quality term. Even so, the examples are not quite unambiguous in their import. It is not evident, to me at least, that each of the following exhibits in Hall’s sense the “characteral tie’’: red is a color; a color is a quality; gray is between black and white. Each may indeed be said to explicate the nature of what the subject term refers to. And so each may be said to be in a suitable sense a necessary statement. But whether each displays the characteristics Hall finds in revelatory descriptives, and does so in the same way, is not obvious. Their assertion in any case implies very different things, and perhaps different kinds of things relative to this discussion although I am not sure. I shall take ‘red is a color’ as a paradigm of the type of assertion Hall wishes to classify as a revelatory declarative.

Hall argues that there is in commonsense a set of differences which serves to distinguish revelatory from descriptive predications. The latter, but not the former, is tensed, at least tacitly. The latter, but not the former, is contingent. A thing could be what it is even if the quality ascribed it were lacking from it. But since revelatory as-

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sertions reveal the natures of what they refer to, what is referred to would not be the quality it is if it lacked the characteral nature asserted of it. These are symptoms of a more profound difference in the relationships exhibited by the two forms of predication, revelatory and descriptive. For the subject of a revelatory assertion refers, according to Hall, not to the property which is ascribed to a particular in a descriptive declarative. The referent is not the unsaturated ascribable, but just the positive character of that ascribable with its exemplifica- itonal nature and role bracketed. Qua subject of the revelatory assertion, we refer simply to a positive nature of a property. It is these natures or charac- ters which we identify, classify, specify, explicate, in our revelatory talk. Com- monsense reflects this sometimes in the explicit occurence of abstraction operators ( “redtwss”) to achieve singular reference to the qualitative nature which may be ascribed to particulars. But the ascriptive itself is not the subject. (Piety, not “pious,” is a virtue.) Cor- relative to this is the fact that predicates of revelatory assertions are not themselves names of properties. More generally, they are not expressions for qualities at all. They do not characterize their subjects but reveal their character, their natures. To say that red is a color is not to characterize (predicate a quality of) redness. It is to reveal something of its nature, something of its pattern of similarities and dissimilarities to other members of a certain set of qualities. This is reflected also in the negation of revelatory declaratives. These do not assert, say, that a tone is not qualified by or lacks a color. They assert that it is other than, or belongs to a different pattern of qualities than the colors.

Whether Hall would cast all tenseless predications of common nouns as revelatory assertions, even those whose subject term refers not to a quality but to a particular, is an interesting specu- lation. Thus, as ‘Red is a color’ reveals

the nature of the quality. so ‘John is a man’ does not describ(. Lhe man but classifies or reveals something of his nature. Like the former sentence, the latter is tenseless. It, 1il.e the former, is “not adventitious”. And to assert, say, that John is not a cat is not to point out something Jchn lacks. But there is no indication here that he would so extend his analysis, and Hall’s paradigm remains LO exhibit a form of declarative predication distinct from that which exhibits the characterizing tie.

The remaining two types of predication which Hall distinguishes are less evident and correspondingly more exciting and more radical. Hall holds that valuative sentences include im- peratives, hortatives, and optatives, which are manifestly unlike the indicative declarative in grammatical form, and declarative value sentences as well. These are sentences which predicate some value term like ‘good’ of some subject. He argues that declarative value predications are ellipses for literal ascriptions of descriptive predicates. To say something of the form ‘a is good’ is to say something of the following form in Hall’s clarified discourse: It were good that a be f, and a is f ; to say something of the form ‘f is good’ is to say that it were good that anything be f . “ . . . when in ordinary speech we say that some individual is good, we mean that it is good in that it exempli- fies certain unspecified properties; and when we say some property is good, we mean it is good that individuals exemplify that property” (P. 77 ) . For Hall, ‘were good’ or ‘were good . . .be . . . ’ is, in a clarified and stylized Ian- guage, a form of the copula, playing a grammatical role roughly like that of of ‘ought’ or ‘ought to be’ in English. The complex of English words has the logical function of creating a valuative tie between subject and natural property. As we assert what is the case, so too we assert what ought to be the case. T o say what a subject ought to be is not a further ascription, qualifi-

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cation or description of the subject. This is an exciting thesis and one

which Hall develops and defends beyond this sketch. It is also, however, a brief anticipation of what he has ar- ticulated at length in What I s Value? It would be foolish to confuse a mock- up of a model with the real thing and accordingly I shall comment on just one point which is relevant to the theme of the present essay quite as much as to his full theory of value.

In an abbreviated comment here Hall mentions the Lcway in which value judgments make reference to a state of affairs.” This is a topic which he dis- cusses at some length in one of the previously unpublished essays in this collection, “How Value Includes Exis- tence” (1947), as well as in What. Hall says, and it seems to be true, that valuatives in general as well as value declaratives in particular command, exhort, or value that which if it ob- tained would make true a “related” descriptive declarative. The way in which it is true is somewhat complicated across the range of valuatives. But that is not the point here. Hall goes on to say that a valuative in its meaning ”embraces” or “involves” a certain corresponding descriptive declarative, the descriptive declarative which would be true if the valuative were satisfied. The way the valuative does so without assesrting thereby the descriptive declarative “is shown simply by pointing out that it is equivalent in meaning to say that its corresponding declarative ought to be true” (p. 201). Finally, Hall articulates this in a Tarski-like se- rnantical condition for the legitimacy of valuatives analogous to that familiar one for Truth.

This is in very many ways difficult but suggestive. But with respect to the present essay it raises serious misgiv- ings about valuatives as a species of predication. It appears to trade upon what seems to be an ambiguity in the notion of a mood of speech. Although the dictionary describes the moods of

speech as modal forms, Hall’s view re- quires in particular htat the contrast between moods, if relevant here, must be a contrast between styles of predication. And this seems to mean that, in a form sufficiently clear for philosophical purposes, these would be reflected in normal forms of sentences differing just in the copula, i.e., in the manner in which individual and predicate terms are concatenated to yield meaningful sentences. I t will not do on Hall’s view to imagine that we have a common sentence-radical (as with Stenius, or Kenney) or phrastic (Hare) to which various operators are prefixed to yield assertions, commands, questions, optatives, etc. Hall’s characteral copula, for example, is not another way of modifying the declarative copula. I t cannot, like a modal operator, occur in adverbial form or be prefixed to a “that-clause.” For that matter, the imperative, “Bring it here,” is not an ellipsis for “I command you to bring it about that you are here.” In the way in which the modals occur de dicto and also, adverbially, de re, the forms expressing the moods are copula- tive verb forms themselves and not modifiers of these. But Hall’s analysis of the value declarative suggests on the one hand that it is a unique form of the copula, hence the relevance of his analysis to this one of his essays; on the other that it functions like a modal modifying that-clauses, hence the way in which it “includes the descriptive declarative” and is equivalent to a sentence of the form ‘‘p ought to be true.’’

Hall sketches a last sentence type, the semiotic declarative sentence, and argues that it too reflects a unique form of predication which is distinct from the others he has examined. This is the most difficult, perhaps least plausible, and least developed of his examples. I t is not perhaps quite obvious just what a ‘kemiotic sentence” is. but, by fixing certain forms as paradigms for Hall, we can sketch his account of the “categorial signifi-

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cancel’ which they do have and of their nature as a distinct form of predication. Hall speaks of syntactical and, generally, metalinguistic sentences as semiotics. His standard example is that of a semantical sentence used to assert the meaning of a word, or of a sentence. I assume he has in mind such (putative) sentences as “ ‘rot’ means (in German) red,” “ ‘und’ means (in German) and,” and even “‘rot’ means red‘ means that ‘rot’ means red.”

That this form of sentence is radically different from those Hall has already distinguished is evident. But why should we suppose that it involves a distinct form of predication rather than merely a distinct type of predicate? Even to put the question in this way assumes that the putative sentences which Hall considers are indeed significant. That even this is not obvious is evidenced by the need to re- inforce the words to the right of “means” by italics. The italics, unex- plained, are at most a symptom but scarcely a solution of an obvious difficulty. Until we understand the rules governing that linguistic device, it is difficult to know how to take these sentence forms. T o take one example, the difficulty is that ‘and’ is a connec- tive in its standard use. But in its unquoted and italicized appearance, the expression is flanked neither by sentences, subject terms, nor predicate terms. How then are we to understand such sentences? If we construe the italicized ocurrence as displaying the fact that the word ‘und’ in German means in that language what the En- glish word ‘and‘ does we no longer have a unique form of predication. For the latter sentence appears to be a descriptive declaration about how certain words in certain languages are used.

Actually Hall does not elaborate the rules governing semiotic sentences nor even the range of such sentences. The argument which he does give to show that, assuming the meaningfulness

of these semiotic forms, they logically in- volve a new style of predication is cur- iously inconclusive. His argument is that since ‘refers’ (perhaps also ‘means,’ ‘designates’ etc.) is not itself the name of a property of a thing, the semiotic sentence cannot be a descriptive declarative. Since these semantical no- tions do not reveal the nature of that to which they are predicated, these sentences cannot be revelatory; etc. Rut even assuming the truth of these remarks, surely this is a revelant argument only if there are just and only the forms of predication Hall has described. But surely if there are these, there may be others. If there are others, then perhaps the semantical terms are predicates ascribed objects in those other ways. Indeed, if one gets into the spirit of this kind of linguistic metaphysics, it is hard not to suppose that there are significant categorial distinctions and distinct styles of predication involved in all sorts of assertions employing grammatically different kinds of predicates.

Apart from this, it is not quite clear that one must accept the truth of Hall’s premises. Why should we not say that reference is either a property of a revelatory characteristic of certain objects, namely certain symbols? Why should we not maintain that it is just that which is the odd and unique thing about symbols, or about reference?

Hall cites some linguistic detail about semiotics which leads him to set them apart. Then he concludes once more with suggestive and exciting remarks about it all. He notes that semiotic sentences are radically language-relative as other sentences are not. He argues that negation is double-barreled for semiotics. Referentially, the assertion that an expression refers to what it does is valid: that it refers to something other than it does is invalid; that it refers to something when it does not refer at all, is non-valid. He suggests that although reference is not a property, it is an important fact that

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(non-semiotic) sentences can be used to refer to what there is, and to say what is the case. This important fact is reflected in what everyday assertions presuppose but is uniquely voiced in semiotic assertions. Hall argues that identity and simple existential state- ments are disguised semiotic assertions which display presuppositions of non- semiotic discourse. Hall concludes the essay

. . . it is apparently impossible . . . to refer to certain sorts of entities or aspects of the world and to distinguish them from others save through some reference to references. The important cases I have in mind are precisely those general aspects of the world which are of categorial significance . . . Everyday language, which is that upon which the philosopher must rest in any attempt to talk clearly about all the main aspects of the world, does not itself, directly, talk about anything so general and abstract as the categories. The categories must thus be recon- structed from the modes of saying much less abstract things in common speech. To refer to the categories assumed in everyday language it thus becomes necessary to talk about the forms of everyday language, especially the types of predication. Thus the only mode of talking about matters of philosophic concern that is actually open is semiotic. Thus philosophy is linguistic analysis. But there is no logical necessity in this. kt is due to the nature of our world, particularly of the laws of linguistic behaviour of humans. And the linguistic analysis which is philosophy is, when successful, i.e., when is- suing in referentially valid sentences, a knowledge of the world. (P. 90).

I11 What shall we make of Hall’s lin-

guistic metaphysics? Taking “Forms” as our sample, it is easy to offer all sorts of criticism to‘ which the litera- ture of the past eighteen years has made us sensitive. We have already

touched upon areas of misgiving and apparent sins of omission and commis- sion. None of this criticism however seems to me to be crucial. Some of Hall’s paper could no doubt be tidied up by rather natural restatement ; some of it is no doubt defensible as it stands; and all of it was meant as the briefest sketch in the broadest strokes of what categorial analysis, as Hall saw it, con- sists. He is not developing the particular theses in detail here, nor in a fashion which he felt ready for publi- cation, apparently. The detail is elab- orated in his later books and articles.

The crucial difficulties are the broad skeptical ones. Hall offers a conception of a certain systematic, general, and self-applicative inquiry. But why should one suppose that systematic philosophy is even possible? And if one takes Hall’s own work as a counter-example nullifying the import of the question, and I do, there remains the doubt as to the worth of it all. Why should we suppose that attempts at systematic philosophy are desirable, or interesting, or that they answer the questions which really concern us? This of course is not something one argues. Before get- ting to more substantive doubts, however, it is worth remarking that it is not just the usual virtues of systematic thought, e.g., consistency, generality, that need to be balanced against contemporary casuistry. Hall was keenly aware that two sorts of philosophical problem are easily missed by the piece- meal investigations of today’s journals. The first of these concerns the way in which a philosophical system is to be estabIished and justified, the way in which it must incorporate and allocate the distinctions and views of opposing philosophies. The second concerns the self-applicability of philosophical categories and principles to the system itself; Hall in this regard referred with approval from time to time to appendix C, “Self-reference in Philosophy”, of Professor Fitch’s Symbolic Logic.

The more substantial skeptical doubts

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concern Hall’s p ticular version of systematic philosop y. The categorial distinctions whose implications Hall sketches in “Formsy’ turn on “styles of predication” implicit in common speech. But surely this is just linguistic provincialism. For Hall’s grammar is the grammar of his native tongue ; even in English Hall’s grammatical distinctions are but few among many; why just these and not others? Even if natural language is uniquely rich in metaphysical insights, why should we suppose the insights lie in the grammar of language? Why not in what we do with the language, the kinds of acts we perform with it? Or in the contrasts among fiction (which has all the grammatical forms present in non-fiction) metaphor, and non-fiction? More basically, how shall we define what a “category” is; how shall we identify the philosophically relevant ones?

It is very difficult to guess how, exactly, Hall would have responded to these questions. We all know that many declaratives do not contain a copula at all, and so grammatically do not contain a certain “style” of declarative copula. We all know that there exist languages without the grammatical resources for expressing, sayy semiotic declaratives. We can generalize our skeptical doubts by imagining a written language without any grammatical form of predication at all. We imagine a language in which descriptive declarative sentences are composed by writing a proper name with certain visible properties of size, texture, color or general typography. The vocabulary of the language we suppose to consist of just a lengthy set of proper names and some logical operators but none of predication. (Clearly a symmetrical language with a vocabulary consisting solely of predicates words appears as likely as this one.) Characterizing declaratives in Hall’s sense we imagine expressed by writing the name of the particular referred to so that it mani-

fests the sensible quality ascribed the particular: ‘John is brown’ is expressed by writing John’s name in the appro- priate shade of ink. ‘John is a man’ is expressed perhaps by writing John’s name in italics (revelatory declarative) . Such a langauge need not be viewed as particularly impoverished; there is no trouble in principle in adapting it to a formal system of combinators with equivalent powers to familiar classical formalisms.

It is clear I think that Hall would not be bothered by the existence of such a language. He would argue that the restriction of the vocabulary, and the rules governing the meaningful way in which names are written, and the steps by which one would correct a misuse or abuse of the language of name-writing, all reveal in different ways the very distinctions he was elab- orating in c form^." I assume that Hall could show this. But this reply is illum- inating. For it now looks as though linguistic metaphysics is not the descriptive metaphysics we supposed. I t now looks as though Hall does not so much find his philosophical categories in common speech as insert them there. Hall in turn has something to say to this. I t concerns the complicated ways in which linguistic analysis is related to common speech. I can here only refer the reader to his fullest statement of this at the end of What. For the present, this bit of dialectic makes pointed the question: How does Hall know a philosophical category when he sees one? What defines one? And how are we to identify them?

I do not know the answer. It is much too easy to suppose, say, that the moods of speech reveal the basic categories. Hall never does so. I suspect that he would deny that there is an effective method for deciding in ad- vance what the relevant categories are. Moreover, it seems pretty clear that, as a tool of analysis, grammar is by no means a touchstone. Hall was an eclectic as to method. So far as I

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can see, he would have been perfectly at home adopting and adapting the current talk of the uses of language and of speech acts to his categorial purposes. Asserting, commanding, querying, as well as describing, calling, identifying, classifying, display in their differences distinctions between characterizing, revelatory and valuative declaratives. Hall was quite willing to adopt the formal or informal analyses of his time and exploit them for his own unfashionable ends. Grammar alone was looked to much more to express as clearly as he could the re- sults of his analyses in a stylized way than to provide a special technique for gaining philosophical insight.

In fact, the philosophical categories with which Hall was especially concerned were related to Iinguistic features which the common nouns related to commonsense classifications seem to lack. Each was associated with a

“linguistic role,” though it is hard to define that term and difficult to generalize from the examples which make its use plausible. But to fact and obligation, there are the modes of speech act, assertion and command; the moods of speech, indicative and imperative; the semantical categories, truth and legitimacy. To substance and attribute, there are naming and ascribing; the syntactical simplicity of words; designation and meaning. To the mind, there are the peculiarities of intentional discourse and the an- alogy to semiotics. Hall’s, work is to be valued for the particular analyses of the detail of such linguistic symptoms, and for its suggestiveness in expoiting others for their metaphysical insights. These values are abundantly present in the collection, Cutegorial Andy&. It contains, by contrast, no universal sol- vent.

I I t needs saying at once that this review comes from the hand of a former student of Everett Hall’s. Henceforth referred to as “What”. Referred to as “Forms” in the remainder of this paper. It is convenient to speak of predicating, ascribing, qualities and properties of things and understanding this as the result of using the matching words. No harm will come if we speak of sentences as doing what people do with them.

’ The ‘lacks’ is important. I t indicates the way in which characterization is adventitious, a purely empirical matter. Not every true negation is grounded in some other fact, say the characterization of the thing by an incompatible quality. And the sense in which a tone is other than a color is finally to be understood in the way in which tones are other than colors, the statement of which involves a very different sense of predication than that of characterization, if Hall is right.

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The Linguistic Metaphysics of Everett W. Hall