To designate a set of attributes or relations the extensionality of a catena it is necessary to identify the neutral predicate and two polar predicates which are each other's opposite. Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to know which of the polar predicates is positive, or should be called "positive", and which one is negative, or should be called "negative", as long as one of them is positive and the other negative and catenated to it. In the traditional variant of the language which is our present means of communication, positivity is often associated (or rather, 'misassociated') with affirmation, and vice versa, whereas negativity is associated with negation, and vice versa. (The same is true for related and ancestral languages, which explains the etymological family relationship between negative and negate(d) in the first place.) This process in which negativity is associated with something that implies or entails negation, and in which negatoriness is associated with something that implies or entails negativity, will be referred to as "the negativity-negatoriness misassociation". It is either caused by the paronymy and homonymy of the terms in question (such as the ambiguity of negative) or by a factor of which the paronymy and the homonymy themselves are consequences too.

Those who confuse negativity and negatoriness tend to value, for example, happiness, activity and honor positive, because their names are of an affirmative nature; and they tend to value un-happiness, in-activity and dis-honor negative, because the names of these predicates are of a negational nature. Originally the effect may have been the other way around, however: since happiness, for instance, was experienced as 'something positive', it acquired an affirmative name, and since unhappiness was experienced as 'something negative', it acquired a negatory name. As the term for the positivity is often unmarked and that for the negativity marked (especially when prefixed), there is a tendency in the present language to evaluate predicates expressed by means of marked terms negative, and those expressed by means of unmarked terms positive. (It has been argued that therefore the use of purportedly unmarked, gender-linked terms such as he and man for both females and males, coincided, or still coincides, with a positive or higher evaluation of what is traditionally masculine and a negative or lower evaluation of what is traditionally feminine, for she and woman are, and never were, analogously employed in an unmarked way.)

Not happy means unhappy only within the narrow framework of the catena's bipolarity, that is, the subset of all happiness- and unhappiness-predicates. But too often is the bipolarity thought to represent all catenary possibilities, and is not positive equated with negative. That sentient being is not happy is, then, believed to mean the same as that sentient being is unhappy. The state --actually, 'both states'-- of indifference, of being-neither-happy-nor-unhappy, is then ignored altogether. The hereditary taint of traditional language is clearly expressed in the fact that the opposite of a positive predicate can be formed very easily by means of prefixes such as un- or dis-, whereas people have to resort to clumsy circumlocutions to describe the neutrality which limits that predicate. Even neither positive nor negative does not denote neutrality alone, for something that is noncatenical is also neither positive nor negative; yet, it is not neutral nevertheless. People are thus saddled with a vicious circle: as they often cannot express themselves easily with respect to neutrality or the condition of not having any predicate of a certain catena, they do not think about these nonpositive, nonnegative alternatives, and as they often do not take these nonpolar alternatives into consideration, traditional language enables the speaker only to express 'imself in an easy, 'natural' way when speaking of the positive or negative properties and relations of things, and when confusing the fact of having a neutrality with the fact of not having any predicate of the catena in question. (It is precisely one of the objectives of the catenical analysis to break thru this vicious circle.)

Increase and all other predicates relating in some way to more and directed to are always to be evaluated positive, because the mathematical meaning of positive which we have taken as prototypic is itself greater than zero. Augmentation, intensification and aiming at something are, then, positive concepts, but predicates like happier (or more happy) and heavier (or more heavy) are only positive, if the corresponding predicates (happiness and heaviness) are also (taken to be) positive. If unhappiness were positive and happiness negative, happier would also be negative, and unhappier positive. Similarly, if lightness is positive, it is not heavier which is positive but its opposite lighter.

In spite of the misassociation of positive with agreeable and good, even agreeableness and goodness need not be positive predicates. The name agreeableness is affirmative and disagreeableness negatory, and this gives us a purely linguistic reason to conceive of agreeableness as a positivity and of disagreeableness as a negativity. (But this does not say anything about nonpropositional reality: in another language it could be the other way around.) The name goodness, however, is not more affirmative than badness, and thus there is even on this view no more reason to call goodness "a positivity" than there is to call badness "a positivity" (and goodness "a negativity"). Even when thinking in catenary instead of auxiliary terms, goodness and badness need not be opposites of each other limited by a neutral attribute neither good nor bad or indifferent. If goodness is the promotion of the normatively superior on the performatory level, then goodness and badness are indeed opposites, but if good is the normatively superior itself, then goodness and badness are each other's supplement, or what would be each other's supplement from a catenary perspective. Goodness then 'limits', on the neutralist view, 'bipolar' badness. Strictly speaking, it is not badness which is bipolar, but bipolarity which is bad. This is one of the reasons for speaking of "an auxiliary series" rather than of "a catena of goodness and badness".