Logicians also use "categorical" to refer to a theory with just one model. --Charles On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Graham White <graham@eecs.qmul.ac.uk> wrote:
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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