The Theory of Predication in the Tractatus: between Sellars and Platonism
Abstract
Wilfrid Sellars advanced a theory of predication which is a version of the theory of the proposition as a picture of reality. In this paper, I will argue that the tractarian theory of predication requires, on the one hand, that predicates are auxiliary symbols (just as Sellars thought) and, on the other hand, that predication itself consists in certain names instantiating a relation, given the isomorphism between language and reality. Thus, Wittgenstein thought on predication in a way which is distinguishable from Platonism by conceiving of predicates as dispensable, but it is also distinguishable from Sellars’s nominalism by conceiving of instantiation relation as indispensable.
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