Nominalism, which has its origins in the Middle Ages and continues into the Twenty-First Century, is the doctrine that there are no universals. This book is unique in bringing together essays on the history of nominalism and essays that present a systematic discussion of nominalism. It introduces the reader to the distinction between particulars and universals, to the difficulties posed by this distinction, and to the main motivations for the rejection of universals. It also describes the main (...) varieties of nominalism about properties and provides tools to understand how they developed in the history of Western Philosophy. All essays are new and are written by experts on the topic, and they advance the discussion about nominalism to a new level. (shrink)

Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted (...) for in terms of concrete particulars. In this paper, we consider a number of different kinds of property nominalism and argue that none of them sits well with property dualism. We pay special attention to the question of what it could mean for a property to count as mental given different nominalistic accounts of properties. Our conclusion is that property nominalism and property dualism are not a stable match. This is surprising, since property dualism has usually been understood as a thesis that is neutral about the nature of fundamental ontological categories and the relation between them. (shrink)

Nominalists are confronted with a grave difficulty: if abstract objects do not exist, what explains the success of theories that invoke them? In this paper, I make headway on this problem. I develop a formal language in which certain platonistic claims about properties and certain nominalistic claims can be expressed, develop a formal language in which only certain nominalistic claims can be expressed, describe a function mapping sentences of the first language to sentences of the second language, and (...) prove some facts about that function and facts about some sound logics for those languages. In doing so, I prove that, given some plausible metaphysical assumptions, a large class of sentences about properties of concrete objects are “safe” on nominalistic grounds. Whenever some true sentences about concrete objects and some sentences belonging to this class that are true according to platonists collectively entail a conclusion about concrete objects, some nominalistically acceptable sentences are true and entail the same conclusion. Because the proof can itself be formulated without abstract objects, it provides a nominalistic explanation of the success of theories that invoke properties of concrete objects. (shrink)

Nominalists need some account of correctness for sentences committed to the existence of abstract objects. This paper proposes a new statement of such conditions specifically for properties. The account builds on an earlier proposal of mine, but avoids the counter-examples against the latter pointed out by Thomas Schindler, particularly, the sentence ‘There are inexpressible properties’. I argue that the new proposal is independently motivated and more faithful to the spirit of the kind of error-theoretic nominalism that the (...) original proposal was part of. Along the way, I also propose novel treatments of Arthur Pap’s and W.V.O. Quine’s notoriously hard-to-paraphrase sentences about abstracta. (shrink)

There are a number of different versions of Reductive Nominalism, versions distinguished by the way in which each accounts for facts about having and sharing properties. This chapter discusses three broad varieties of Reductive Nominalism: Predicate Nominalism, Class Nominalism, and Resemblance Nominalism. Class Nominalism identifies properties with classes or sets. Resemblance Nominalists come in two sub‐varieties, depending on whether they take the resemblance relation to hold between particular properties (called 'tropes') (...) or particular things that have properties (ordinary particulars). Trope Theory comes in two varieties depending on whether one plumps for universals. It should not be difficult to see that Extreme Resemblance Nominalism is faced with Class Nominalism's extensionality problems, both the problem of contingent predication and the co‐extensive property problem. Resemblance Nominalists can reply by insisting on a distinction between a priori or conceptual equivalence and metaphysical equivalence. The chapter focuses on the extensionality problems for Class Nominalism. (shrink)

This paper explores the impact of quantification into predicate position on the metaphysics of properties, arguing that two familiar debates about properties are fundamentally altered by recasting them in a second-order setting. Two theories of properties are outlined, differing over whether the existence of properties is expressed using first-order or second-order quantifiers. It is argued that the second-order theory: provides good reason to regard debate about the locations of properties as contentless; resolves debate (...) about whether properties are particulars or universals in favour of universals. (shrink)

‘Nominalism’ refers to a family of views about what there is. The objects we are familiar with (e.g. hands, laptops, cookies, and trees) can be characterized as concrete and particular. Nominalists agree that there are such things. But one group of nominalists denies that anything is non-particular and another group denies that anything is non-concrete. These two sorts of nominalism, referred to as ‘nominalism about universals’ and ‘nominalism about abstract objects’, have common motivations (...) in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In this dissertation I consider the merits of certain nominalist accounts of phenomena related to the character of ordinary objects. What these accounts have in common is the fact that none of them is an error theory about standard cases of predication and none of them deploys God or uniquely theistic resources in its explanatory framework. -/- The aim of the dissertation is to answer the following questions: -/- • What is the best nominalist account on offer? • How (...) might it be improved? • Does it ultimately succeed? -/- I will argue that while so-called trope theory is the best account on offer, it can be significantly improved—or replaced—by a novel version of nominalism that is modeled after trope theory. Ultimately, however, I will argue that even the novel version fails. -/- The dissertation unfolds as follows. In Chapter 1, I introduce Austere Nominalism (AN), which is perhaps the most extreme version of nominalism that falls within the scope of the dissertation. AN is often described as the view that there exist only concrete particulars. According to AN, it is unnecessary to posit any entities other than ordinary objects—turkeys, tables, and the like—in order to account for explananda related to the character of those objects. (Such explananda include the phenomenon of attribute agreement, of attribute possession, of true subject-predicate sentences, etc.) In this chapter I argue that AN fails to provide an adequate account of these explananda. In addition, introducing and criticizing AN serves an important heuristic role for the rest of the dissertation. To understand this role, we must distinguish between the basic explanatory strategy deployed by the austere nominalist and the type of explananda for which she deploys that strategy. The austere nominalist deploys the strategy to account for the character of ordinary objects. As I argue in Chapter 1, this deployment is a failure. As I go on to show in Chapter 2, the widespread rejection AN has led to a variety of rival accounts of the character of ordinary objects. In rejecting AN, however, these accounts also tacitly reject its basic explanatory strategy. Thus goes the baby with the bathwater, since, arguably, there are some attractive features of AN’s basic explanatory strategy. Indeed, those who defend the most prominent version of nominalism—trope theory—seem to overlook the advantages of AN’s basic strategy, and by so doing, make an unnecessary concession to the realist. Or so I argue in Chapter 3. And, as I will argue in Chapter 4, the strongest version of nominalism is a novel account, modeled after trope theory, that deploys AN’s basic strategy at a more fundamental level than that of ordinary objects. This novel account—troper theory—is closer in spirit to AN than is traditional trope theory. (Thus, AN serves as a foil for the discussion of other nominalist views.) Finally, in the Afterword I indicate how troper theory is equally vulnerable to some of the traditional objections that plague trope theory. Thus, if you are not convinced that traditional objections to trope theory are conclusive and you want to be a nominalist, then you should abandon trope theory and adopt troper theory. If you take traditional objections against trope theory to have significant force, then you should reject both theories. (shrink)

It is argued that, if Armstrong is correct and truthmakers necessitate the truths they make true, then the truthmakers must include facts about the meanings of the words used to express those truths, and nominalism apparently results. This conclusion, no doubt unpalatable to Armstrong, is, it is claimed, the result of his having failed to distinguish sufficiently the meanings of words and the properties of things.

The concept of population thinking was introduced by Ernst Mayr as the right way of thinking about the biological domain, but it is difficult to find an interpretation of this notion that is both unproblematic and does the theoretical work it was intended to do. I argue that, properly conceived, Mayr’s population thinking is a version of trope nominalism: the view that biological property-types do not exist or at least they play no explanatory role. Further, although population thinking (...) has been traditionally used to argue against essentialism about biological kinds, recently it has been suggested that it may be consistent with at least some forms of essentialism—ones that construe essential properties as relational. I argue that if population thinking is a version of trope nominalism, then, as Mayr originally claimed, it rules out any version of essentialism about biological kinds. (shrink)

Can we do science without numbers? How much contingency is there? These seemingly unrelated questions--one in the philosophy of math and science and the other in metaphysics--share an unexpectedly close connection. For as it turns out, a radical answer to the second leads to a breakthrough on the first. The radical answer is new view about modality called compossible immutabilism. The breakthrough is a new strategy for doing science without numbers. One of the chief benefits of the new strategy (...) is that, unlike the existing substantialism approach from Field (1980), the new strategy naturally generalizes to theories formulated in terms of state space. (shrink)

James Ladyman has argued that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, and that this renders constructive empiricism untenable. We maintain that constructive empiricism is compatible with modal nominalism. Although the central term 'observable' has been analyzed in terms of counterfactuals, and in general counterfactuals do not have objective truth conditions, the property of being observable is not a modal property, and hence there are objective, non-modal facts about what is observable. Both modal nominalism and constructive empiricism require clarification (...) in the face of Ladyman's argument. But we also argue that, even if Ladyman were right that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, this would not be a problem for constructive empiricism. (shrink)

In this chapter, I present the first systematic trope nominalist approach to natural kinds of objects. It does not identify natural kinds with the structures of mind-independent entities (objects, universals or tropes). Rather, natural kinds are abstractions from natural kind terms and objects belong to a natural kind if they satisfy their mind-independent application conditions. By relying on the trope theory SNT (Keinänen 2011), I show that the trope parts of a simple object determine the kind to which it belongs. (...) Moreover, I take the first steps to generalize the trope nominalist theory to the natural kinds of complex objects. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls “nominalism.” On the one hand, there is his “psychological nominalism,” according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities—be they properties, relations, or facts—is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is (...) fundamentally a world of concrete particulars and so does not ultimately contain such things as properties, relations, or propositionally-structured facts. Sellars clearly takes these two sorts of “nominalism” to go together. However, one of the most influential inheritors of Sellars's philosophy, Robert Brandom, thinks that they do not. Brandom endorses the former, but denies that the latter “is in the end so much as intelligible.” In this paper, I articulate the connection between Sellars's psychological and ontological nominalism and draw on Brandom's own development of Sellars's functional role semantics to argue, against Brandom, that Sellars's ontological nominalism not only harmonizes with the rest of his philosophical commitments, but is actually made fully intelligible by the very aspect of Sellars's theory that Brandom himself develops. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that for the purposes of ordinary reasoning, sentences about properties of concrete objects can be replaced with sentences concerning how things in our universe would be related to inscriptions were there a pluriverse. Speaking loosely, pluriverses are composites of universes that collectively realize every way a universe could possibly be. As such, pluriverses exhaust all possible meanings that inscriptions could take. Moreover, because universes necessarily do not influence one another, our universe would not (...) be any different intrinsically if there were a pluriverse. These two facts enable anti-realists about abstract objects to replace, e.g. talk of anatomical features with talk of the inscriptions concerning anatomical structure that would exist were there a pluriverse. The availability of such replacements enables anti-realists to carry out essential ordinary reasoning without referring to properties, thereby making room for a consistent anti-realist worldview. The inscriptions of the would-be pluriverse are so numerous and varied that sentences about them can play the roles in ordinary reasoning served by simple sentences about properties of concrete objects. (shrink)

I defend a reading of David Hume’s nominalism that he comes close to Keith Campbell's contemporary trope theory in the specific case of spatial properties. I argue that Hume's view should be construed as classifying spatial properties as Campbellian tropes (particular properties): abstract, particular, determinate and qualitatively simple properties. This has implications for reconstructing Hume's answer to the problem of universals. I argue that Hume’s account of objects resembling each other in respect of spatial (...) class='Hi'>properties is grounded in the resemblance of tropes rather than in the resemblance of objects. (shrink)

I here defend a theory consisting of four claims about ‘property’ and properties, and argue that they form a coherent whole that can solve various serious problems. The claims are (1): ‘property’ is defined by the principles (PR): ‘F-ness/Being F/etc. is a property of x iff F’ and (PA): ‘F-ness/Being F/etc. is a property’; (2) the function of ‘property’ is to increase the expressive power of English, roughly by mimicking quantification into predicate position; (3) property talk should be (...) understood at face value: apparent commitments are real and our apparently literal use of ‘property’ is really literal; (4) there are no properties. In virtue of (1)–(2), this is a deflationist theory and in virtue of (3)–(4), it is an error theory. (1) is fleshed out as a claim about understanding conditions, and it is argued at length, and by going through a number of examples, that it satisfies a crucial constraint on meaning claims: all facts about ‘property’ can be explained, together with auxiliary facts, on its basis. Once claim (1) has been expanded upon, I argue that the combination of (1)–(3) provides the means for handling several problems: they help giving a happy-face solution to what I call the paradox of abstraction , they form part of a plausible account of the correctness of committive sentences, and, most importantly, they help respond to various indispensability arguments against nominalism. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the coextension difficulty for nominalist theories of properties that reject tropes alongside universals. After carefully explaining the coextension difficulty and describing the theories it targets, the chapter describes different solutions to the difficulty. These solutions differ with respect to how much involved they are into a dualist approach to coextension. A dualist approach to a case of coextension consists in agreeing with the realist that the relevant ascriptions of properties are numerically distinct. A (...) monist approach to a case of coextension consists in contending that the relevant ascriptions of properties are identical. In this chapter, I defend a monist approach to cases of coextension that appeals to a counterpart theory for propositions. (shrink)

How do we account for resemblance between concrete particular objects? What is it about reality which makes a sentence such as the following true? (1) x and y are both spherical Realists about properties claim that, at a fundamental level, this sentence is true because x and y both exemplify the property of sphericity. Michael Loux favours this account of resemblance. Nevertheless, Loux concedes that austere nominalism, which I understand to be the view that nothing exists (...) over and above particular concrete objects, can offer a plausible account of resemblance. (shrink)

If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstract eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to (...) anything that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets, while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time. (shrink)

Universals are properties that are shared by multiple objects. In classical South Asia, Brahmanical thinkers from Vyākaraṇa, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, and Mīmāṃsā text traditions were realists about universals, while most Buddhists were nominalists. In this paper, my aim is to reconstruct the early Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika theory of universals, with special emphasis on the arguments of the Nyāya philosopher Uddyotakara (6th century CE) against a Buddhist strand of resemblance nominalism. I show that Uddyotakara's contribution to this debate is twofold. First, (...) he is possibly the first Naiyāyika to adopt a sparse theory of universals, a theory according to which it is necessary to posit only those universals which explain how objects resemble each other in the most fundamental or irreducible respects. On the other hand, he offers a few arguments for realism, which are explicitly motivated by a causal constraint on intentionality. (shrink)

A problem for Aristotelian realist accounts of universals (neither Platonist nor nominalist) is the status of those universals that happen not to be realised in the physical (or any other) world. They perhaps include uninstantiated shades of blue and huge infinite cardinals. Should they be altogether excluded (as in D.M. Armstrong's theory of universals) or accorded some sort of reality? Surely truths about ratios are true even of ratios that are too big to be instantiated - what is the (...) truthmaker of such truths? It is argued that Aristotelianism can answer the question, but only a semi-Platonist form of it. (shrink)

This chapter gives a broad description of the nature of properties and explains the foundations of metaphysics. It provides general statements about properties and how they describe parts of a metaphysical environment. These properties are used to develop the theory of causal powers. The chapter also attempts to address the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of nominalism and realism, including selective realism and its properties. The chapter also introduces conceptual distinctions such as derivative-basic, first-order-higher-order, simple-complex, essential-necessary-accidental, (...) extrinsic-intrinsic, and transferable-non-transferrable. Secondary definitions are also given. (shrink)

Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice (...) between modifier tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theory simpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general. (shrink)

Laws of nature are merely expressions of the powers possessed by various kinds of things, and counterfactual conditionals are grounded in the powers and tendencies of the entities involved in the counterfactual supposition together with their counterfactual surroundings. There are two versions of Strong Powerism. One takes the truthmakers for causal laws to be universals (a 'Realist' version). The second takes the truthmakers for causal laws to be the particulars that fall under the laws (a 'Nominalist' version). This chapter focuses (...) on how Powerism compares to other views about the laws. Neo‐Humeism has the leanest metaphysical theory, since its class of fundamental truths includes no conditionals, laws of nature or attributions of power. Metaphysically, Nomism is burdened with a large number of brute necessities, linking laws with actual patterns of particular fact. The chapter talks about the causal theory of properties: causal structuralism. (shrink)

The paper begins by considering Russell's criticism of Meinong's theory of objects and Sosein that center on the notions of negation and existence. The discussion raises issues about functions, properties, predication, the "concept" of existence and relations. These lead to a consideration of recent revivals of moderate nominalism in the form of trope theories. An argument against such theories suggests a fundamental principle of ontology and a reformulation of the nominalism-realism dispute.

The paper begins by considering Russell's criticism of Meinong's theory of objects and Sosein that center on the notions of negation and existence. The discussion raises issues about functions, properties, predication, the "concept" of existence and relations. These lead to a consideration of recent revivals of moderate nominalism in the form of trope theories. An argument against such theories suggests a fundamental principle of ontology and a reformulation of the nominalism-realism dispute.

This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism, and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead (...) lead to either metaethical naturalism or non-naturalism. We can therefore investigate the metaethical question on its own terms only within the framework of trope theory. (shrink)

Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls “internalism” with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstracta exist, it precludes the existence of natural numbers, thus establishing what he calls “restricted nominalism” (...) about natural numbers. We argue that Hofweber’s internalism fails to establish restricted nominalism. Not only is his primary argument for restricted nominalism invalid, the analysis of quantification proposed threatens to collapse internalism into either a traditional form of error theory or realism. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of the old empiricist claim that to think about unobservable physical properties a subject must be able to think perception-based thoughts about observable properties. The central argument builds upon foundations laid down by G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. It bridges the gap separating these foundations and the target claim by exploiting a neglected connection between thought about properties and our grasp of causation. This way of bridging (...) the gap promises to introduce substantive constraints on right accounts of perception and perception-based thought. (shrink)

Resemblance Nominalism About Perfect Naturalness is the view that perfect naturalness of classes is best defined by a conceptual primitive of resemblance between particulars. The adequacy of RNPN is defended by outlining nominalism as the strictly anti-constitutive view that the particulars’ being the fundamental ways they are is not constituted by anything further, supplying a doubly plural contrastive and graded resemblance predicate that allows for a definition of perfect naturalness on an actualist basis, and proving a representation (...) and a uniqueness theorem on the basis of a formal constraint on resemblance called “the Principle”, thereby revealing that bodies of nominalist resemblance facts are guaranteed to behave as if they were grounded in patterns of universals distributed over particulars. (shrink)

Conventionalism about property is the view that all moral duties correlative to property rights depend essentially either on the existence of a convention that assigns conventional ownership of objects, or on the existence of a body of positive law that confers legal property rights. It has been objected that, if Conventionalism about property is true, then it is impossible for someone to have her property right violated by someone who is not a member of the community in which (...) her conventional property right is assigned. But it is possible. When Christopher Columbus sailed up to the island of Hispaniola in 1492, he and his sailors wronged the inhabitants by forcing them off their land. So, Conventionalism is false. This is the Outsider Challenge for Conventionalism. The Outsider Challenge (and its first premise, in particular) receives support from the Benefit Condition, according to which one can be morally obligated to comply with a conventional rule only if one benefits or has one’s interests protected by the convention of which it is a part. Despite its provenance and plausibility, however, I think that the Benefit Condition should be rejected. Doing so in a principled way allows us to square Conventionalism with our moral intuitions and, thus, address the Outsider Challenge. My main aim in this essay is to reject the Benefit Condition in one such principled way by providing a Contractualist answer to the question of when, and why, someone is morally required to respect another’s conventional property right. One is morally required to respect the conventional property rights of another when and because failing to do so would run afoul of the Principle of Established Practices (pep) – a principle for which I give a Contractualist justification. Roughly, the pep requires us to comply with sufficiently just social practices in the absence of special justification, and the fact that one’s interests are not protected by a property convention is not always a sufficiently strong reason for one to violate the duties assigned by that convention. Since the fact that one’s interests are not protected by a property convention is not necessarily a special justification for violating the pep, the pep gives us reason to reject the Benefit Condition and, thus, the Outsider Challenge, too. (shrink)

This book explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age narratives and other evolutionary accounts of the transition of mankind from primeval communality to regimes of ownership. The issue of the legitimacy of private ownership exercises the minds of the major political thinkers as well (...) as theologians and jurists throughout the ages. The book gives full consideration to the historical development of Rights Theory, with special reference to the right to property. It ends with a comparative study of the Declarations of Rights in the American and French Revolutions and seeks to explain, with reference to contemporary documents, why the French recognised an inalienable, human right to property whereas the Americans did not. (shrink)

A couple of doubts are raised concerning Hofweber’s internalist view of our talk about properties. The first doubt relates to the argument used in support of the internalist view of talk about properties: I suspect that one of the premises of the argument is not granted and therefore that the argument’s conclusion is undermined. My second doubt concerns a claimed consequence of Hofweber’s internalist view, i.e. conceptual idealism. It seems to me that conceptual idealism is incompatible (...) with the internalist view of talk about properties. (shrink)

W.V.O. Quine has famously objected that (1) properties are philosophically suspect because (2) there is no entity without identity and (3) the synonymy criterion for property identity won't do because there's no such concept as synonymy. (2) and (3) may or may not be right but do not prove (1). I reply that Leiniz's Law handles property identity, as it does for everything else, then respond to a variety of objections and confusions.

This chapter has two aims. The first aim is to present an overview of Bolzano's universe from the point of view of his metaphysics and its relationship to logic, relying fundamentally on Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre. The author's preferred reading of Bolzano is one according to which he is a 'platonistic nominalist': a platonist about propositions and a nominalist about properties. Bolzano's nominalistic tendencies are particularly conspicuous in his mereological analyses, which play a major role in every aspect of (...) his philosophy. The author's second aim is to answer the open question of whether in Bolzano there is any 'ontology of truth'. This chapter argues for a negative answer. Bolzano does not make room for any special object which plays the role of the counterpart of a truth-bearer, or at least his propositions do not connect semantically in a direct way to anything that would count as such a special object. (shrink)

In considering the nature of properties four controversial decisions must be made. (1) Are properties universals or tropes? (2) Are properties attributes of particulars, or are particulars just bundles of properties? (3) Are properties categorical (qualitative) in nature, or are they powers? (4) If a property attaches to a particular, is this predication contingent, or is it necessary? These choices seem to be in a great degree independent of each other. The author indicates his own (...) choices. (shrink)

The paper argues that the assumption that there are property designators, together with two theoretically innocent claims, leads to a puzzle, whose solution requires us to reject the position that all (canonical) property designators are rigid. But if we deny that all (canonical) property designators are rigid, then the natural next step is to reject an abundant conception of properties and with it the suggestion that properties are the semantic values of predicates.

David Lewis is typically interpreted as a class nominalist. One consequence of class nominalism, which he embraced, is that the reduction of ordered pairs, triples, etc to unordered sets of sets is conventional. The reaction by his Australian counterparts D.M. Armstrong and Peter Forrest was that Lewis was not being ontologically serious. This chapter evaluates this debate over serious ontology. It is argued that in one sense Lewis is ontologically serious, but that his additional commitment to structuralism about (...) classes should push him to adopt a trope-theoretic account of naturalness, which opens up another way to respond to the charge of not doing serious ontology. This conclusion is supported by certain remarks he makes in his correspondence, thus revealing how his thinking about properties appears to have evolved from property-egalitarianism to a sparse theory of tropes. (shrink)

There is substantial controversy about the nature of both particulars and properties. Some philosophers think that the categories of particular and property are fundamental, that at least some of the things in both are in no way derived from or dependent on things in another category. These philosophers are Realists about both particulars and properties. Nominalists think of particulars as fundamental and of properties as non‐fundamental, with the latter being derived from the former. This chapter (...) explores why someone might go in for Realism about properties. If one insists that universals are just properties that could be exemplified by more than one thing, Class and Resemblance Nominalism turn out to be committed to universals. Ostrich Nominalism is much larger qualitatively, since UP‐Realism has only two fundamental kinds, whereas Ostrich Nominalism has n fundamental kinds. Ostrich Nominalists must posit a very large number of metaphysically fundamental sorts of things: spheres, cubes, blue things, red things, etc. (shrink)

We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild’s purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH+, which is the combination of “simple hylomorphism” and an innocuous premise. We show that the deduction, reminiscent of Russell’s Paradox, is proof-theoretically valid in classical higher-order logic and invokes an impredicatively defined property. We provide a proof that SH+ is nevertheless consistent in a free higher-order logic. It is shown that the unrestricted comprehension principle of property abstraction on which the (...) purported proof of inconsistency relies is analogous to naïve unrestricted set-theoretic comprehension. We conclude that logic imposes a restriction on property comprehension, a restriction that is satisfied by the ramified theory of types. By extension, our observations constitute defenses of theories that are structurally similar to SH+, such as the theory of singular propositions, against similar purported disproofs. (shrink)

'Natural class' trope nominalism makes a trope's being of a certain sort--its nature--a matter of its membership in a certain natural class of actual tropes. It has been objected that on this theory had even a single member of the class of red tropes not existed, for example, then the type 'being red' would not have been instantiated and nothing would have been red. I argue that natural class trope nominalism can avoid this implication by way of counterpart (...) theory as applied to properties. (shrink)

This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about certain mind-independent “things” and so music is left out of the picture, or it is about an “intentional object” and so its puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. (...) The general idea is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of fetishism: musical works are not “things”, in Danto’s sense of “mere real things”; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events, and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson and Howell’s notion of indication, combined with Searle’s approach to institutional reality... with a little twist of my own. (shrink)

Things are particulars and their qualities are universals, but do universals have an existence distinct from the particular things describable by those terms? And what must be their nature if they do? This book provides a careful and assured survey of the central issues of debate surrounding universals, in particular those issues that have been a crucial part of the emergence of contemporary analytic ontology. The book begins with a taxonomy of extreme nominalist, moderate nominalist, and realist positions on (...) class='Hi'>properties, and outlines the way each handles the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and abstract reference. The debate about properties and philosophical naturalism is also examined. Different forms of extreme nominalism, moderate nominalism, and minimalist realism are critiqued. Later chapters defend a traditional realist view of universals and examine the objections to realism from various infinite regresses, the difficulties in stating identity conditions for properties, and problems with realist accounts of knowledge of abstract objects. In addition, the debate between Platonists and Aristotelians is examined alongside a discussion of the relationship between properties and an adequate theory of existence. The book's final chapter explores the problem of individuating particulars. The book makes accessible a difficult topic without blunting the sophistication of argument required by a more advanced readership. (shrink)

This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type‐free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The (...) proposed theory fulfils the major desiderata stemming from Kripke's works on proper names. (shrink)