Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic linguistic structure, predication itself, involves a commitment to abstracta, for common explications of predication make essential mention of properties, relations, and such.  Sellars argues that this gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact, misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic correctness. Sellars offers a different explication of predication, according to which the focus is not on any relation between an object and some abstract entity, but qualifying and arranging names to suit them for certain linguistic purposes. So understood, the Platonist’s treatment of predication seems, again, to be an elaborate and misleading way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. At the most basic, atomic level, predication is a matter of endowing names with counterpart characteristics of the objects they purport to name, enabling some true atomic sentences to ‘map’ or ‘picture’ objects in the world. Predication thus commits one only to natural objects potentially correlated with each other. NAO, chapter 3, contains the most complete statement of this view. 