You're question is one of classical metaphysics. The passage on predication is very much Aristotelian; as Kelly Ross puts it: 'the Aristotelian "form" of an object is its substance (the "substantial form") and its essence, not all abstract properties belong to the essence. The "essence" is what makes the thing what it is. Properties that are not essential to the thing are accidental, e.g. the color or the material of a chair. Thus the contrast between "substance and accident" or "essence and accident." ... A contrast may also be drawn between substance and "attribute." In this distinction, all properties, whether essential or accidental, belong to the substance, the thing that "stands under" (sub-stantia in Latin, hypo-keímenon, "lie under," in Greek) all the properties and, presumably, holds then together. Since the properties of the essence are thought together through the concepts produced by abstraction, the "substance" represents the principle of unity that connects them.

Concepts, or predicates, are always universals, which means that no individual can be defined, as an individual, by concepts. "Socrates," as the name of an individual, although bringing to mind many properties, is not a property; and no matter how many properties we specify, "snub-nosed," "ugly," "clever," "condemned," etc., they conceivably could apply to some other individual. From that we have a principle, still echoed by Kant, that "[primary] substance is that which is always subject, never predicate."'

"The object is an apple"; "the apple is green"; "green is a colour." Knowledge comes into being in the movement from predication to substantiation (as a subject). — tim wood

That, to me, reflects the process of what has come to be called 'apperception', whereby an object is identified by the process of recognition and categorisation and so incorporated into knowledge.

The subject is always something of some kind: a brick or star, seven or the square root of two, a unicorn, love or anger or apathy, or even nothing reified as that about which something is said. — tim wood

I still think a distinction can be drawn between analytic a priori and a posteriori. In classical metaphysics, that is the distinction between mathematical or logical knowledge and sensory knowledge.

When I try to find the bottom of things, that is, what underlies, what I find is predication. Something said or thought about something. In English it's always is, whether or not the is is explicit. I suspect in other languages it's the same, no matter the language or the grammar. Always the is. Thinking, the same - near as I can tell. Feeling, emotion, as reaction doesn't seem to need an is. But it does in articulation: hunger to "I am hungry," and so forth.

This omnipresence of predication must be a clue to something. — tim wood

That's a good start.

It doesn't follow that all thought is existentially dependent upon predication.

In articulation...

That's key, I would think.

Calling something "the bottom of things" presupposes that we've arrived at a basis. Predication is a part of the basis of all spoken/written language.

I would strongly argue that spoken language is not part of the the basis of all thought.

The two have something else in common.

A creature capable of drawing correlations, connections, and/or associations between different things.

Some predicate-less creatures are capable of drawing correlations between their own behavior and what happens afterwards. These are causal connections being made by a creature without language.

The attribution of causality is not existentially dependent upon language. One cannot think or believe that touching fire causes discomfort without drawing the aforementioned correlations. One cannot draw the correlations unless they are thinking. That's precisely what all thought consists of. Mental correlations drawn between different things. There are no exceptions. None are immune.

All reporting upon some candidate or another that we could bring to bear will consist of language.

A report of something is not always equivalent to what's being reported upon... reports upon thought notwithstanding. The report requires thinking about thought. Thinking about thought cannot happen unless there is something to think about. Thinking about thought is existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought. It is also existentially dependent upon written language. We use the terms "thought", "belief", "understanding", "perception", "worldview", etc.

All mental ongoings capable of being appropriately and sensibly called "thought" must presuppose it's own correspondence and be meaningful.

That's what all predication does.

That's what all pre-linguistic and/or non-linguistic thought does as well.

Ought this not be considered more basic than predication? Surely.

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Are you saying that Aristotle's word - nearly the first word on many subjects - is also the last word on the topics of this thread? — tim wood

No. I’m simply pointing out that the general style of the analysis - the division into ‘subject and predicate’ - is strongly reminiscent of Aristotelian metaphysics. I wasn’t intending to belittle or dismiss the OP but to point out this similarity. That is all I was getting at.

The passage I quoted was from a review by Kelly Ross called Meaning and the problem of Universals. You might find it relavant, as it does also discuss the issue of ‘meaning’ in some detail.

It doesn't follow that all thought is existentially dependent upon predication.
— creativesoul

Why "existentially"? Why "dependent"? Are these qualifications necessary or relevant? — tim wood

These questions have already been adequately answered. It may be helpful to address the post I made just prior to this one.

We look to language to find thought. There is no reason to believe that all thought must consist of language. All predication does.

While it's true that one often 'finds predication at the bottom of things', one has to wonder if this is due to a confusion of the tool for the object: that is, language. Wayfarer is right to point out that the primacy of the subject-predicate distinction is primarily Aristotelian in inspiration, and it should also be noted that Aristotle himself modeled his understanding of Being precisely on the structure of language:

"Aristotle treats here [in the Categories] of things, of beings, insofar as they are signified by language, and of language insofar as it refers to things. His ontology presupposes the fact that, as he never stops repeating, being is said (to on legetai...), is always already in language. The ambiguity between logic and ontology is so consubstantial to the treatise that, in the history of Western philosophy, the categories appear both as classes of predication and as classes of being.

.... The structure of subjectivation/presupposition remains the same in both cases: the articulation worked by language always pre-sup-poses a relation of predication (general/particular) or of inherence (substance/accident) with respect to a subject, an existent that lies-under-and-at-the base [hypokeimenon, as Wayfarer again pointed out -SX]. Legein, “to say,” means in Greek “to gather and articulate beings by means of words”: onto-logy." (Agamben, The Use of Bodies).

Agamben's own take is that this modelling of Being upon language - and, implicitly, knowledge upon language - has massively overdetermined the trajectory of Western philosophy, and that what is needed is an entirely new approach to all of it. But regardless of that, the point is simply that it is unsurprising that, in the necessary recourse to language to expresses knowledge, we 'find predication': it is not unlike opening the fridge door and being surprised to find that each time, the fridge light is on.

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Um, no. If all reporting "will consist in language," then all we have is language. — tim wood

This is a specious claim. It is borne of sorely neglecting to draw and maintain the meaningful distinction between a report and what is being reported upon.

We have both. The latter does not necessarily consist of language. The former always does.

Thought, for present purpose, is mental activity that we are, or become, aware of. Mental processes and activity we are not aware of, for present purpose, are not thought. — tim wood

This is self-contradictory on it's face. Thought - if something that we can become aware of - must exist prior to our becoming aware of it, lest there would be nothing to become aware of. So, the first claim contradicts the second. If either is true, then the other cannot be. That is to say that they are negations of one another.

That's completely unacceptable.

Language is a behaviour that expresses something.

Are you prepared to admit all of the absurd consequences of this definition? Books do not contain behaviour. Following your 'logic', books do not contain language.

You'll have to do better than this...

Is there something primordial to language? There must be, imo. But I don't know what it is. — tim wood

We agree here. I'm trying to show you how you can know. You began in the right place, by looking towards known examples of thought. It is a particularly good move to look for the common denominators. You found and focused upon only one; predication. You then drew a conclusion that neglected to draw and maintain a distinction that is crucial to understanding the basis of all thought, including all predication. And you've ignored relevant arguments hereabouts. Not a good start.

There are some simple things that we can know and work from there.

All language consists of shared meaning. Whatever shared meaning requires, then so too does language.

Follow me so far?

Is there something primordial to language? There must be, imo. But I don't know what it is. And the theories about what that is all seem to arrive at analogously the same conclusion that flight engineers come to with bumblebees: they can't fly. — tim wood

Gotta love those foregone conclusions...

I put it to you that the flight engineers aren't considering all of the relevant facts. The same is true of your method and any other that ends without knowledge of what all thought is.

Can you think of any expressive behaviour that does not predicate? — tim wood

My ducks, the wee ones that is, express their hunger by virtue of partially opened mouthes and walking back and forth between my chair and the food bin, all the while looking up at me.

No predication necessary.

It's not clear from what you've adduced here whether being is created in language, or (merely) expressed through and by language. We could recast the question as, Is there being absent language? — tim wood

Not quite any of these; to put it more simply, for Aristotle, the 'characteristics' of Being are the same as the 'characteristics' of language. Aristotle's ontology is not an 'expression' of language nor 'dependent' on it or whatever; it's simply that it shares the same structure (so just as one speaks of subject and predicate, for example, in Aristotle Being is articulated by essence and accident, the one reflecting the other); it's a matter of an 'isomorphism' between Being and language, if it can be put that way. Or in the words of the linguist Emile Benveniste, who first drew attention to this:

"Aristotle thus posits the totality of predications that may be made about a being, and he aims to define the logical status of each one of them. [However], these distinctions are primarily categories of language and that, in fact, Aristotle, reasoning in the absolute, is simply identifying certain fundamental categories of the language in which he thought. ... He thought he was defining the attributes of objects but he was really setting up linguistic entities; it is the language which, thanks to its own categories, makes them to be recognized and specified. No matter how much validity Aristotle's categories have as categories of thought, they turn out to be transposed from categories of language.

It is what one can say which delimits and organizes what one can think [in Aristotle]. Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties of things as recognized by the mind. This table of predications informs us above all about the class structure of a particular language. It follows that what Aristotle gave us as a table of general and permanent conditions is only a conceptual projection of a given linguistic state." (Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics).

Again, the import of this is that of course you find predication every time you look for it: it's because the tool you're using for your search is language.

And for me it's not a matter of being surprised that the fridge light is on, but rather that I've come to question just what it means that the light is on; and wonder that it is, apparently, the only light there is. — tim wood

It is not the only light it is. There are other ways to approach ontology that are not simply confined to Aristotle's equivocations between language and Being. Agamben, who I cited previously, for example, advocates for what he refers to as a 'modal ontology' where (following Spinoza), Being is expressed modally, in terms of its manner or 'way' of Being, and not, as per the Aristotelian model, in terms of the distinction between substance and accidence (and hence subject and predicate: an ontology of 'possession' as distinct from an ontology of 'expression'). Deleuze, elsewhere, suggests speaking of Being according to the grammatical category of the infinitive, such that we do not say 'the tree is green' but rather 'the tree greens' (this is not a great way to communicate of course, but that's the point - the needs of communication are idiosyncratic and hardly generalizable, so we should not expect that the world is simply structured like our language).

I mention these two examples obviously only in their most bare-bones form, but the point is that ontology - and in its wake knowledge - is not exhausted by the subject-predicate articulation, and we should be incredibly suspicious about any approach to knowledge which simply sees in it what it is put there to begin with. Not only is it circular, but it is highly inattentive to other ways of looking at things which are out there.

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