 In reducing the categories to his triad of substance, quality, and action, Valla does not seem to have in mind “realist” philosophers who accepted the independent existence of entities such as relations and quantities over and above individual things. Instead, his aim is to show that many terms traditionally placed in other categories, in fact, point to qualities or actions: linguistic usage (loquendi consuetudo) teaches us, for example, that quality is the overarching category. Thus, to the question “of what kind”, we often give answers containing quantitative expressions. Take, for instance, the question: what sort of horse should I buy? It may be answered: erect, tall, with a broad chest, and so on. Valla’s reduction of the categories often assumes the form of grammatical surveys of certain groups of words associated with a particular category: thus, in his discussion of time, he studies words like “day,” “year,” and a host of others; and his discussion of quantitative words treats mathematical terms such as line, point and circle. Of course, Valla does not deny that we can speak of quantity or time or place. But the rich array of Latin terms signify, in the final analysis, the qualities or actions of things, and nothing exists apart from concrete things. (Substance is a shady category for Valla, who says that he cannot give an example of it, much as Locke was later to maintain that “a substance is something I know not what”).