[2] (Aristotle also makes numerous references to priority, as well as posterity, in two of his most influential works, Physics and Metaphysics.)
To use René Descartes' famous phrase, "cogito ergo sum," in a slightly different context than the one he originally intended, Aristotle would have agreed with Descartes' reasoning that a person/thinking thing is ontologically prior to the activity of thinking.
Whereas if both things came to exist at the same time or bear no meaningful relationship (even if one came before the other), then an ontological priority cannot be said to occur.
These would be among the strongest forms of reasoning in philosophy and logic, since they carry the same certainty as analytic truths, and the denial of any one of them would result in an impossibility.
A "thing" can be a physical object/particular, idea/universal, or a tone/quality and can share an ontological/existential before-after relationship with any of the aforesaid three types of entities.
[3][4] If one suspected that the aforementioned trichotomy (viz., particulars, universals, and qualities) bears similarities to the type-token-tone framework of C. S. Peirce, a theorist who was not born until about 2,161 years after Aristotle's time, one would be correct.
Aristotle's implicit understanding of this trichotomy is already quite evident by his first book of Physics, for example; he makes references and distinctions between the three abundantly.
(It is true that some persons lose the capacity for thought or the ability to walk, but these are two of many examples of particulars and ideas that are integrated with things, which helps understanding the perspective of how ontological priorities work.)
For this reason, "triadic" would be a better term, since the three types of ontological phenomena are not mutually exclusive or an either/or.
In Aristotle's terminology, this triadic relationship would have much to do with what he calls substance, essence, and accidental attributes, among other things, and according to Aristotle, universals (which are similar to his mentor Plato's Forms/Ideas) cannot be prior to substance, and accidental features (which are qualities, tones, or properties), such as the quality of whiteness (the example Aristotle uses many times against Melissus and Parmenides), cannot exist without substance either.
Reciprocity and non-reciprocity of implied existence (or prior by nature) are the second of Aristotle's formulations and are among the more difficult/complex of them all; the example Aristotle gives of a reciprocal/non-reciprocal ontological priority is through the example of numbers: one is prior to two because if there are two then it follows at once that there is one whereas if there is one there are not necessarily two, so that the implication of the other's existence does not hold reciprocally from one.
Order is Aristotle's third formulation of the ontological priority and is somewhat more or as complex as the previous one; a better way to understand this is the organization of something, be it science, speech, etc.
As we saw with Aristotle's comment of this formulation being perhaps the least proper, it is made clear by him that he regards this form of ontological reasoning with disdain.
"Truth-maker" is the fifth and last of Aristotle's formulations of what ontological priorities are, and, as a comprehension heuristic, one could think of it in terms of Alfred Tarski's "x makes it true that p."[8] Alternatively, one may think of the similarities between this formulation and the correspondence theory of truth.
Furthermore, the Tarski truth-maker formula and the correspondence theory of truth roughly represent half of Aristotle's formulation; the other half goes above and beyond the truth-making and extends into ontology and the cause of a thing's existence, which is what makes it an ontological priority in the first place.
(14b15–20)[7]In this example, Aristotle, makes it clear that a physical object referenced by a statement cannot be posterior to it; this is related (but not quite equivalent) to Aristotle's belief, against Plato's substantive and independently existing Forms/Ideas, that the only reality universals have is with their instantiations in particulars.
But it is worth noting, once again, Aristotle does not explicitly call them "truth-makers"; he strongly emphasizes that particulars determine the truth and falsity of statements, and not the other way around.
Last, Aristotle explained that this formulation, which was dubbed "truth-maker" for clarity, is an expansion, or is a variation, of the second formulation of reciprocity and non-reciprocity of implied existence (or by nature); this is to say that, in Aristotle's man-statement example, "For there being a man reciprocates as to implication of existence with the true statement about it [him]" (14b10–15).
The similarities between the correspondence theory of truth and Aristotle's fifth formula is that both involve "matching" a statement with a truth-maker, a "correspondence, hence the theory's name; however, where the two ideas differ is that Aristotle holds truth-makers to be ontologically prior (in the fifth sense) to statements.
Although formulation four is quite controversial, for the presumption (i.e., "thought") that persons are prior or posterior to each other is determined in part "by nature" (not to be confused with formulation two) is often exemplified in racism, formulation five is quite controversial in philosophy because it leaves open-ended questions with respect to anti-realism or scepticism, depending on whether statements are existentially caused by truth-makers (hence, anti-realism with respect to language) or whether statements are only caused to be true per se, thus, opening up the door as to whether the correspondence between "there is a man" and the physical man was dreamt, imagined, hallucinated, mistaken, etc., hence, the problem of realism-scepticism.
But it would be question-begging for one to know how to play a game of volleyball (i.e., the leathery ball's purpose) without knowing what the leathery ball or the game is (i.e., significance or meaning);[17] hence, similarly, there is a linguistic knowledge requirement (or constraint) where it is not humanly possible to meaningfully answer "what is the meaning of life?"