Categories and predicables, mode of being and mode of thinking

De Smet makes a wonderfully clear distinction between categories / predicaments and predicables: categories belong to the mode of being, predicables to the mode of thinking. It is unfortunate, he goes on, that this distinction has not been seen clearly by Indian philosophers; and this failure vitiates many of their teachings. In particular, Kanada's table of categories / padarthas includes the predicables which it unduly ontologises. "Although he did see that they depend on thought for their discovery, he did not see that they are by their very nature purely logical. This is due to his uncritical realism as expressed in the saying, 'And there is no knowledge without an [ontological] object' (na c'avisaya kacid upalabdhih)."