denomination
This glossary entry unpacks the meaning of denomination and derivative words like “denominative” & “denominatively”.
Denomination translates the Latin denominatio (“derivativeness”), and denominatio is the substantivized form of paronymum (“derivative”), the Latin translation of Aristotle’s παρώνυμα, from which we also derive the English “paronym” (Aristotle, Categories I.1a13–14). A paronym is a word which is a derivative of another and has a related meaning.
EX. “wisdom” is a paronym of “wise.”
I am open to correction on this, but writers seem to me to use the verb denominate to mean “identifies a name by means of the following predicate”.
EX. "Red denominates this car".
In other words, the property “red” sort of names (“denominates”) the car by means of a Russellian “definite description”.
Some rough usage equivalents might be:
- Denominative = relational (indicates the type of naming).
- Denominatively = relationally (indicates a way of naming).
(Ross suggests this equivalence) - Denominate = name relationally.
Ross claims in Portraying Analogy that:
“Aquinas distinguished two kinds of denomination.”
(1) The subject of the denominating expression is the cause. The predicate is the effect.
EX.'The food is healthy' means: The subject (food) is the cause. The predicate (health) is the effect.
(2) The subject of the denominating expression is not the cause. The predicate is the effect of a different cause, and the subject inherits the effect.
EX. 'The novel is brilliant' means: The subject (novel) is not the cause of the predicate (brilliance). The subject merely inherits the effect. It is causally derivative.
Thus the predicate “brilliant” is equivocal.
It means one thing when applied to the author, another when applied to the novel.
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EX. Bright sun means brightness caused by the sun.
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EX. Bright air does not mean brightness caused by either sun or air.
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EX. Bright author means brightness caused by the intelligence of the author, but ...
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EX. Bright novel does not mean brightness caused by either book or author.
It is as though you truncate the causal reference in order to create a new form of predication.
It is the truncation of the causal relation between an author and his work that differentiates the two meanings of the predicate.
Productive Properties VS. Resultant Properties
Ross indicates that a more descriptive way of describing the difference is between the two kinds of denomination is productive VS. resultant.
- EX. productive properties: bright sun, bright bulb and brilliant author.
- EX. resultant properties: bright air, bright room and brillian book.
Denomination, Ross says, is a kind of relational (or ‘derivative’) naming, where a predicate names a subject by means of a relationship that is not explicitly mentioned, as in ‘Food is healthy’ where ‘healthy’ does not really refer to ‘food’ strictly speaking (since food is inanimate and cannot be ‘healthy’) but rather to the unmentioned creature that is implicity assumed to consume the food. The predicate ‘healthy’ names (or ‘denominates’) ‘food’ thanks to an implicit (unstated) relationship between food and the creature that consumes the food. All four of the analogies listed above represent some variant or other of this kind of relational naming.
Denominative meaning, relational naming, is referred to at the beginning of Aristotle’s Categories (Ia, 13); the passage is rendered in various English translations with the word ‘derivative‘ taken from the Greek for ‘paronymous‘.’ St Anselm in his Dialogus De Grammatico speaks of ‘grammatico’ as one of the terms ‘quae . . . denominatire dicuntur’ and proceeds to inquire ‘Whether an account of their meaning shall at the same time involve an account of their reference’.
But no systematic discussion that I know of (except for Anselm’s which was directed at different objectives) occurred until St Thomas Aquinas distinguished some kinds of denomination (De Ver., 21, 4, ad 2.) 3 In the sixteenth century Suarez (trans. Ross 1964) and John of Saint Thomas (trans. Simon et al. 1955) employed ‘denomination‘ in the broad sense of ‘naming‘ or characterizing something on account of its relations to something else, for instance ‘father‘ or ‘sister‘.
Ross points out that John Locke also used the word “denomination” to refer to naming by means of a relationship.
John Locke, (Essay, III, II, 17; VI, 9, and II, ch.25, sections 2-7), uses ‘denomination‘ to mean ‘relational naming‘ and explicitly distinguishes ‘extrinsic denominations’ (section 2), contrasts denomination with ‘absolute’ naming in section 3 and relates denomination to his general account of relations (section 5): ‘The nature therefore of relation consists in the referring or comparing two things one to another, from which comparison one or both comes to be denominated.’
Denomination actually brings about a change in meaning in the predicate. The significatum (what is meant) changes with context. Denomination removes the predicate from its original context. For example, the predicate “healthy” in “Bill is healthy because he eats well” is tied semantically to the subject Bill. But if we say “Bill’s food is healthy” and finally “Food is healthy” we sever the explicit (stated, overt) tie between “healthy” and “Bill”. The tie is still there but it is only implicit. And when we change the tie between “healthy” and “Bill” from explicit to implicit, it changes the meaning ever so slightly of “healthy” or as Ross says, it differentiates the meaning of “healthy”.
For example, the analogy of meaning between ‘healthy’, applied to the intrinsic state of a dog, and ‘healthy’, applied to the appearance of its coat. Its distinguishing characteristic is that one of the words can be defined as signifying a causal, manifestive or representative (etc.) relation to what is signified by (the significatum of) the same word in another occurrence. But there are other kinds of modally differentiated, interdefinable same words as well. After explaining denominative analogy and certain of its species (analogy of attribution, ascriptive analogy and representational analogy), I extend the classification to paronyms, both to expand the theory’s descriptive scope and to reinforce the reader’s perception of its truth, as the predicates of the analogy theory itself obey the regularities they describe, and differentiate (by proportionality) when applied to paronyms.
Also in Portraying Analogy:
“Sometimes a word in one of its meanings can be defined entirely as meaning (signifying) a causal (or other) relation to the significatum of the same word in one of its other meanings. That is Aquinas‘ and Cajetan‘s notion of Analogy of Attribution: Whenever a word differentiates so that it signifies a relation (any of the Aristotelian four kinds of causing and also in any of the ‘sign of’ relations) to the significatum of another same word, there is analogy of attribution as Cajetan described it, and a denomination of the first kind that Aquinas distinguished: able performance/able performer; agile leap/agile dancer; moral man/moral act; intelligent man/intelligent statement.8 The list of such differentiations in English is immense.”