Class (philosophy) in the context of "Classic"

In ontology, the theory of categories concerns itself with the categories of being: the highest genera or kinds of entities. To investigate the categories of being, or simply categories, is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities. A distinction between such categories, in making the categories or applying them, is called an ontological distinction. Various systems of classification have been proposed; these often include categories for substances, properties, relations, states of affairs, or events. A representative question within the theory of categories might be, for example, that which asks: "Are universals prior to particulars?"

In philosophy and logic (especially metaphysics), a property is a characteristic of an object; for example, a red object is said to have the property of redness. The property may be considered a form of object in its own right, able to possess other properties. A property, however, differs from individual objects in that it may be instantiated, and often in more than one object. It differs from the logical and mathematical concept of class by not having any concept of extensionality, and from the philosophical concept of class in that a property is considered to be distinct from the objects which possess it. Understanding how different individual entities (or particulars) can in some sense have some of the same properties is the basis of the problem of universals.

The type–token distinction is the difference between a type of objects (analogous to a class) and the individual tokens of that type (analogous to instances). Since each type may be instantiated by multiple tokens, there are generally more tokens than types of an object.

For example, the sentence "A rose is a rose is a rose" contains three word types: three word tokens of the type a, two word tokens of the type is, and three word tokens of the type rose. The distinction is important in disciplines such as logic, linguistics, metalogic, typography, and computer programming.

A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Microsoft) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation). Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique (the Hendersons, the Everglades, the Azores, the Pleiades). Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns (the Mozart experience; his Azores adventure), or in the role of common nouns (he's no Pavarotti; a few would-be Napoleons). The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention.

A distinction is normally made in current linguistics between proper nouns and proper names. By this strict distinction, because the term noun is used for a class of single words (tree, beauty), only single-word proper names are proper nouns: Peter and Africa are both proper names and proper nouns; but Peter the Great and South Africa, while they are proper names, are not proper nouns. The term common name is not much used to contrast with proper name, but some linguists have used it for that purpose. While proper names are sometimes called simply names, this term is often used more broadly: "An earlier name for tungsten was wolfram." Words derived from proper names are occasionally called proper adjectives (or proper adverbs, and so on), but not in mainstream linguistic theory. Not every noun phrase that refers to a unique entity is a proper name. For example, chastity is a common noun even though chastity is considered a unique abstract entity (constrasted with the personal name Chastity, which is a proper name).