Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Graham White <graham@eecs.qmul.ac.uk>]

One factor might be that the philosophical tradition also has the
terminology "category", but means rather different things by it,
and they tend to use "categorial" (I think, but I haven't really
checked). In particular, both Kant and Husserl use categorial a lot.
So (since we started using the word category later than the philosophers
did) saying "categorical" is a way of avoiding confusion.

(Philosophers do use the pair hypothetical/categorical as a way of
talking about preconditions for assertions, but that's so different from
what we do that it's unlikely to cause confusion). All of this is off
the top of my head, and could do with checking.

Graham

On 06/09/12 19:39, peasthope@shaw.ca wrote:
> Apologies in case this story is in the archive.  I failed to find it.
>
> According to online dictionaries, categorical and categorial can be
> synonyms.  Almost everyone seems to prefer categorical whereas
> categorial comes from the simple rule of replacing the last vowel of
> the noun with "ial".
>
> So, is the preference for categorical just an inheritance from early
> authors?  Is there a stronger reason to use it?  Is the explanation
> in the archive?
>
> Thanks,            ... Peter E.
>
>
>



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