This is a critical treatise on predication: What is predication? What constitutes it? What form does it show? What is its function? What is it used for? Where can we locate its phenomena?
Predication is a primitive relation. It cannot be defined in other terms. The relation has the form: A predicates B. Henceforth, A is defined as ‘the predicater’(praedicans), and B is defined as ‘the predicated’(praedicatum). Predication is a relation holding among the items of the world(the meanings of the representing words), and these items constitute the material of the structure. There may be various conditions and restrictions on the material.
Where a predication is set, there arises a state of affairs. It constitutes the state of affairs by shaping it as it looks. Before predication, the state of affairs cannot arise (out of the flux), it would be formless, it wouldn’t be anything we could name or discern. Only through predication the states of affairs show themselves, they come to exist before our eyes. And the predication is represented in language in the form: A predicates B. Through language we can establish the phenomenon of predication. Thus, predication constructs the states of affairs. Likewise, the modification constructs the things, and conjunction constructs the complex structures: the complex of things, the complex of states of affairs and so on. These three(modification, predication, conjunction) are the principles of world construction.
The view that the world can exist independent of the knower(observer), the so-called objectionism, is criticized. And we cannot say that there can exist a thing or what cannot be said.
Finally Donald Davidson(2005)’s view of predicantion is criticized. He set the question in the wrong form, so his proposed solution is not a genuine solution. Predication makes a unity of a sentence by the very relation, predication. The unity of a sentence cannot be achieved or assured by any property, or any function of its parts. There is a relation set on the items and the items constitute unity by the very relation.
I propose to take the various ways of researching language. The language can be viewed not only as a system of forms, but as a process, as an action, as a force, as a socio-historically developing system. And it can be studied with the help of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, sociology, history and science. Predication can be viewed as a force of constructing the world, the state of affairs. The way of studying language is envisaged that treats the linguistic phenomena critically, the fundamental facts, the forms and the materials, and the limits and possibilities, and the functions or forces, which may be called “critical linguistcs”. The critical linguistics must comprise the scientific findings or principles of the age.