Campbell discussed the substantival self as something core to each person which determines their actions prior to the engagement of rational thought. This view echoes Aristotle's description of the soul as an indivisible kind of non-physical substance, as found in his Categories. To Campbell, the substantival self is the part of us that remains stable in the face of change, allowing us to remain the same as other less fundamental features are altered.
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It is relatively common for a language to distinguish between demonstrative determiners or demonstrative adjectives (sometimes also called determinative demonstratives, adjectival demonstratives or adjectival demonstrative pronouns) and demonstrative pronouns (sometimes called independent demonstratives, substantival demonstratives, independent demonstrative pronouns or substantival demonstrative pronouns). A demonstrative determiner modifies a noun: :This apple is good. :I like those houses. A demonstrative pronoun stands on its own, replacing rather than modifying a noun: :This is good.
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Geach did not use the exact term "sortal"; however, his idea of the "substantival expression" is identical or nearly so to that of "sortal". According to him, identity is relative in a sortal concept, which he described as one that answers the question "Same what?".
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Bob Hale explains salva congruitate, as applied to singular terms, as substantival expressions in natural language, which are able to replace singular terms without destructive effect on the grammar of a sentence.Bob Hale, Singular Terms, P34 Thus the singular term 'Bob' may be replaced by the definite description 'the first man to swim the English Channel' salva congruitate. Such replacement may shift both meaning and reference, and so, if made in the context of a sentence, may cause a change in truth-value. Thus terms which may be interchanged salva congruitate may not be interchangeable salva veritate (preserving truth).
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This deviation allowed Campbell to embrace the concept of free will later in his career, a step Bradley refused to take based on his belief in the interconnectedness of all things. Campbell expresses the ideas which support this stance most clearly in the Gifford Lecture later published as On Selfhood and Godhood, which begins in a study of human cognition. In On Selfhood and Godhood, Campbell gave a description of the self as an innate feature of human beings. He used two different terms to explain a feeling of individuality seemingly persistent to all humans: the ‘substantival self’ and the character.
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The part of us that can be altered is what Campbell refers to as our character, which can also be roughly thought of as our personality. Through the substantival self's experience of the world, we develop manners of being which can be referred to in universal terms: one can be kind, for example, though this can change over time if they are treated in a way which encourages them to be more callous in their social interactions. These habits develop through experience and form the character, which grants us the ability to influence an environment defined by the common values that determine the state of natural things. Someone who can be kind has more mobility in the social world, for example, just as a rounder rock will roll faster down a hill than a more angular one of similar size.
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Campbell made the comparison between Hume's view that the mind is passive and Plato's theory of the forms, which claims that the world is made up of non-physical values called forms, which accumulate as perceivable objects seemingly of their own volition. This is the kind of agency sense datum would need to have were the mind passive, and the comparison to Plato is piercing because Plato's philosophy is considered one of the earliest metaphysical doctrines, stating that the forms exist as non- physical determinants of the perceivable world. Discussion of non-physical entities is the kind of thought Hume made a strong habit of rejecting. Believing that it was patently illogical to assume that the sense datum responsible for our development of character could plant themselves in our consciousness from the outside, Campbell supported his view of the substantival self by claiming that it plays an active role necessary to our cognition.
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While such a character would be unique to an individual as something determined circumstantially – having occurred in a specific time and place – Hume's view of the self eschews any discussion of the individual as unique in their own right, before they are determined by quantifiable experience. Campbell supported his belief in the substantival self by calling it absurd to suggest – as Hume did – that the character is formed solely by our experience of the world as provided by sensory perception, with no input from any kind of pre-rational self. This, he argued, is fundamentally counterintuitive, as perception is generally understood to be an act whereby a perceiver perceives something, and must begin with them directing their attention towards the object of their perception. To imply that our characters are entirely determined by our experiences implies that our minds are wholly passive in the process of cognition, and that the objects of our perception are somehow acting on us so as to appear as concepts in our minds.
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While Campbell did not ascribe to Bradley's belief in an absolute reality which determines the course of all physical and non- physical activity, he did maintain a belief in a form of the absolute he called the ‘suprarational’: an objective non-physical reality which is the ultimate subject of our cognition, and which contains the ordering principles (time, shape, etc.) we access in order to understand and manipulate our material environment. He believed that we have access to these principles because the indivisible substantival self exists as a will, or volition, of the being responsible for creating them. Campbell refers to this being as God, though he believed that because the creator of the world would have to be a pure self, with no physical component, no collection of universal concepts designed to facilitate an understanding of the physical world (such as language) would be sufficient to describe it. This is because the creator of these principles would have to transcend all difference, existing outside a world defined by contradictory values which can be mentally conceptualised and are therefore accessible to rational thought.
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This would require that all words are to be > analysable into atomic elements, 'roots' or 'bases' and 'affixes' or > 'inflections' -- better known in Sanskrit as dhātu and pratyaya [...] Yāska > reported the view of Gārgya who opposed Śākaṭāyana (both preceded Pāṇini who > mentions them by name) and held that not all substantival words or nouns > (nāma) were to be derived from roots, for certain nominal stems were > 'atomic'. Sakatayana also proposed that functional morphemes such as prepositions do not have any meaning by themselves, but contribute to meaning only when attached to nouns or other content words: :(The ancient grammarian) Sakatayana says that prepositions when not attached (to nouns or verbs) do not express meanings ; but Gargya says that they illustrate (or modify) the action which is expressed by a noun or verb, and that their senses are various (even when detached).Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom Or Examples of the Religious, Philosophical and Ethical Doctrines of the Hindus, 1876 (quote from Goldstuecker's translation of Yaska's Nirukta) This view was challenged by Gargya. This debate goes to the heart of the compositionality debate among ancient Indian Mimamsakas and Vyakaran/grammarians.
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In Egyptology, the Standard Theory or Polotskyan Theory, sometimes abbreviated ST, is an approach to the verbal syntax of the Egyptian language originally developed by Hans Jakob Polotsky in which Egyptian verb forms are regarded as variously adjectival, substantival, or adverbial,Niccacci, Alviero (2009) “Polotsky’s Contribution to the Egyptian Verb-System, with a Comparison to Biblical Hebrew” in Egyptian, Semitic and General Grammar: Studies in Memory of H. J. Polotsky, pages 401–465 with the possibility of ‘transposing’ any given verb phrase into any of these three classes.Depuydt, Leo (1993) Conjunction, Contiguity, Contingency: On Relationships between Events in the Egyptian and Coptic Verbal Systems, page xv et seq., quoting Polotsky, Hans Jakob (1987) “Grundlagen des Koptischen Satzbaus: Erste Hälfte” in American Studies in Papyrology 27Loprieno, Antonio (1995) Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, pages 8–10 This analysis rests on the basis of systematically applying substitutional rules for syntactic nodes, whereby certain verb phrases are seen to be syntactically converted into noun phrases or adverb phrases because of the possibility of substituting such phrases in place of the verb phrase. This approach was widely adopted in the mid-20th century but eventually fell out of favor starting in the 1980s.
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