 In natural language, however, many predicates appear to be multigrade or variably polyadic; i.e., they can be used with different numbers of arguments, as they can be true of various numbers of things. For example, we say “John is lifting a table”, with “lifting” used as dyadic, as well as “John and Mary are lifting a table”, with “lifting” used as triadic. Moreover, there is a kind of inference, called “argument deletion”, which also suggests that many predicates that prima facie could be assigned a certain fixed degree are in fact multigrade. For example, “John is eating a cake” suggests that “is eating” is dyadic, but since, by argument deletion, it entails “John is eating”, one could conclude that it is also monadic and thus multigrade. Often one can resist the conclusion that there are multigrade predicates. For example, it could be said that “John is eating” is simply short for “John is eating something”. But it seems hard to find a systematic and convincing strategy that allows us to maintain that natural language predicates have a fixed degree. This has motivated the construction of logical languages that feature multigrade predicates in order to provide a more appropriate formal account of natural language (Grandy 1976; Graves 1993; Orilia 2000a). Since natural language predicates appear to be multigrade, one may be tempted to take the properties and relations that they express to also be multigrade, and the metaphysics of science may lend support to this conclusion (Mundy 1989).