Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Fred E.J. Linton]

[Categorically, the last on this... ]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:39:11 +0100, Graham White wrote:

> ... both Kant and Husserl use categorial ...

Sorry, didn't Kant write in German? Where would he find use for 
the English word "categorial" in German?

Anyway, his English translators tend to render one of his expressions 
as "the categorical imperative", but even that may just be in the few 
translations I happen to have encountered.

(I'll not address Husserl.)

Cheers, -- Fred

(PS: my mail software, fwiw, flags the categorial quoted above (and also 
the unquoted instance in this very sentence) as misspelled :-) . -- F.)



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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Fred E.J. Linton]

Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine <p.l.lumsdaine@gmail.com> added:

> Both constructions have plenty of examples; the OED online’s wild-card
> search is useful here, e.g.
>
http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=*orical&_searchBtn=Search.
> This gives 81 words with -orical, against 279 with -orial.  The -orial
> examples are mostly from verb roots — dictatorial, professorial, etc.

Of course, these two don't stem from any "dictatory" or "professory", or?

> — but with some exceptions: armorial, (im)memorial, and so on.   I’m
> not enough of a linguist to see any full explanation for which words
> get which suffix.

The question is not which sort of ending occurs more frequently,
-orical or -orial, but whether there's a "rule" by which a final
"-y" on a noun gets converted to a final, adjectival, "-ial".

I suggested earlier, by a long list of such nouns, that, if there is 
such a rule, it's more honored in the breach than in the observance.

Again, if there is such a rule, why does it not apply to the nouns
bigotry, burglary, comedy, empathy, felicity, poetry, progeny, prosody,
registry, sodomy, sophistry, story, symphony, therapy, ..., zealotry? 
We have neither storial nor storical, for instance (despite "historical"
(but not "historial") from history), nor ... (left to the reader) ... .

Even for words like memory, remedy, or testimony, the results of the 
*+y => *+ial "rule" have meanings rather far from the adjectival 
"relating to the notion of *+y " meanings that most *+ical constructs 
derived from corresponding *+y nouns have.

Memorial, for example, is a noun, signifying an object serving to recall
a given memory, not an adjective signifying "relating to memory";
remedial, though an adjective, signifies, "serving to remediate", not 
"relating to the notion of a remedy"; and a testimonial is, again, a noun, 
not an adjective meaning "of, or related to, testimony".

Perhaps only arterial, from artery, comes close, but even it means
"flowing as through an artery", rather than "related to, or having to 
do with, arteries".

And alluvial, jovial, sartorial, are words in the *+ial camp that do not,  
however, arise from any application of Peter Pease's proposed "rule",
any more than do radial or medial -- or their ^c^ counterparts
radical and medical: there is no noun alluvy, jovy, or sartory -- or
rady or medy -- to apply such a rule to, any more than there is a cony 
to engender conical, or comy for comical.

> But in the case of categories, the OED backs up what others have
> written: categorists are/were simply following standard usage.
> “Categorical” is older and more widely used, going back  to 1598, and
> with plenty of both colloquial and technical usage.  “Categorial”
> appears in 1912 in philosophy, and from the 50’s in linguistics, but
> remains mostly restricted to these fields.  Google N-grams gives a
> quick view of the comparative frequency:

Comparative frequency of these endings is -- must I say again? -- irrelevant.
(Ah: and Pease's "rule" doesn't work on "frequency", either? How comial :-)
.)

Cheers, and peace, -- Fred



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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Fred E.J. Linton <fejlinton@usa.net> wrote:
> Peter Easthope (peasthope@shaw.ca) proposed:
>
>> 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?
>
> It's a lovely "simple rule", Peter, but where does it apply? Certainly not to
> Allegory, Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Catastrophe, Economy, Geology,
> History,
> ..., Numerology, Ornithology, Philosophy, Psychology, ..., Topology, ...,
> Zoology.

Both constructions have plenty of examples; the OED online’s wild-card
search is useful here, e.g.
http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=*orical&_searchBtn=Search.
This gives 81 words with -orical, against 279 with -orial.  The -orial
examples are mostly from verb roots — dictatorial, professorial, etc.
— but with some exceptions: armorial, (im)memorial, and so on.  I’m
not enough of a linguist to see any full explanation for which words
get which suffix.

But in the case of categories, the OED backs up what others have
written: categorists are/were simply following standard usage.
“Categorical” is older and more widely used, going back to 1598, and
with plenty of both colloquial and technical usage.  “Categorial”
appears in 1912 in philosophy, and from the 50’s in linguistics, but
remains mostly restricted to these fields.  Google N-grams gives a
quick view of the comparative frequency:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=categorical%2Ccategorial&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Even proponents of “categorial” generally take this for granted, I
think.  Goldblatt, in the preface of his (lovely) book on topoi,
explains his motivation as precisely to *break* with the older and
more common usage of “categorical” in logic, to distinguish  the new
sense from the old.

Best,
–Peter.


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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Peter Selinger]

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the etymology of
"categorical" derives, via Latin, from Greek kategorikos, which seems
to be a Greek adjective derived from kategoria.

This seems to be consistent with other English words deriving from
Greek adjectives ending in -kos, such as logikos (from logos) and
graphikos (from graphein), explaining "geographical", "psychological",
and so on.

I found one online source claiming "Greek adjectives that end in -kos
do not describe the substance out of which something is made. They
describe the force that is animating the thing in question", but I
don't know if it's a reliable source. See also page 28 in this book
(from 1772, copyright probably expired):

books.google.com.ar/books?id=o6EDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA28

-- Peter

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=20
> synonyms.  Almost everyone seems to prefer categorical whereas=20
> categorial comes from the simple rule of replacing the last vowel of=20
> the noun with "ial".
>
> So, is the preference for categorical just an inheritance from early=20
> authors?  Is there a stronger reason to use it?  Is the explanation=20
> in the archive?
>
> Thanks,            ... Peter E.
>

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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Robert Dawson]

On 06/09/2012 3:39 PM, 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?

 	Firstly, the usage goes back far before category theory. The early
authors include Kant and W. S. Gilbert.

           Secondly, I think "categorical" has always been the more
common usage.

 	Robert


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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Fred E.J. Linton]

Peter Easthope (peasthope@shaw.ca) proposed:

> 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?

It's a lovely "simple rule", Peter, but where does it apply? Certainly not to
Allegory, Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Catastrophe, Economy, Geology,
History, 
..., Numerology, Ornithology, Philosophy, Psychology, ..., Topology, ...,
Zoology. 

"Arterial", from artery, and "peripheral", from periphery, look more like
exceptions 
to, rather than instances of, any rule. Or am I overlooking masses of other
evidence?

Anyway, has anyone started speaking yet (in English) of Kant's "categorial
imperative"?

Cheers, -- Fred 



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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Robert Seely]

AFAIK, the only (main?) use of "categorial" is in the context of
categorial grammar (a monoidal-category approach to linguistics,
roughly) - and it'd probably cause confusion now if it moved into
other applications of category theory.

-= rags =-

On Thu, 6 Sep 2012, 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.
>
>
>
>

-- 
<rags@math.mcgill.ca>
<www.math.mcgill.ca/rags>


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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Graham White]

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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Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Michael Barr]

Someone (Lambek?) used a title of the sort "On categorical and categorial
grammars".  Categorial grammars are based on grammatical categories such
as noun, verb, etc.  That doesn't explain why categorists have always used
"categorical", but it is a minor reason not to change.  Of course, the
major reason is that there is no reason to change.

Michael

-- 
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in
moral philosophy--the search for a superior moral justification
for selfishness.  --J.K. Galbraith


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Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[peasthope]

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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