Abstract
In this article, a critical assessment is carried out of the two available forms of nominalism with respect to the ontological constitution of material objects: resemblance nominalism and trope theory. It is argued that these two nominalistic ontologies naturally converge towards each other when the problems they have to face are identified and plausible solutions to these problems are sought. This suggests a synthesis between the two perspectives along lines first proposed by Sellars, whereby, at least at the level of the simplest, truly fundamental constituents of reality, every particular is literally both an object and a particularized property (or, alternatively put, the distinction between objects and properties dissolves). Some potential problems and open issues for such an approach to nominalism in ontology are identified and discussed, with particular emphasis on the sort of fundamentalism that seems to crucially underlie the proposed ontology.
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Notes
For example, that objects are constituted by universals but are bundle-instances rather than bundles: see Rodriguez-Pereyra (2004).
For a more precise and exhaustive discussion of this point, see Morganti (2011b).
See, for instance, Sider (2006).
The latter also posits some primitive relation ‘gluing’ tropes together. The ontological status of such glue is, of course, open to discussion. But so is that of the sort of compresence relation postulated by bundle theorists. In what follows, it will simply be assumed that there exists a relation of mutual existential dependence holding tropes together, the postulation of which doesn’t entail ontological ‘proliferation’.
The following analysis is close to that in Morganti (2007).
For a specific treatment of this problem, see Rodriguez-Pereyra (2001).
Obviously enough, this last sentence is not formulated in the terms of resemblance nominalism. It just conveys the basic idea more easily. The same will apply in what follows in similar cases.
It is an open question to what extent this undermines the appeal of resemblance nominalism, which Rodriguez-Pereyra, for instance, considers importantly connected to the preservation of intuition and established beliefs, and hence to the idea that commonsense, everyday objects are fundamental (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002; 201-202). Prima facie, however, it would seem that a commitment to the existence of a subset of concrete particulars which are truly fundamental because simple is not worse, in terms of intuitive plausibility, than the endorsement of the complicated conceptual machinery devised by Rodriguez-Pereyra. The guiding assumption of this paper is that the former position is in fact preferable to the latter, but even if one disagrees with this it remains useful to define a possible nominalistic position different from those currently on offer.
Moreover, says Paseau, these views have other problems: Lewis’ is ‘triply infinitary’, as its basic predicate is infinitary, its background logic allows infinitely many conjunctions and disjunctions, and it also allows quantification over infinitely many variables; Rodriguez-Pereyra’s, instead, privileges classes of a certain type (pair sets) without argument, assumes resemblance to be ultimately binary without providing a reason for it, and has an infinite number of primitive resemblance relations, one for each degree of resemblance (see above).
Of course, it can still be the case that property-instances depend on concrete particulars in the sense that they do not exist free-floating and are always bundled with other property-instances so as to form objects. However, first, this is not necessarily the case, and empirical evidence (e.g., in the form of one-property fundamental particles such as antineutrinos) seems to show that it is in fact at least contingently false. Secondly, and more importantly, the problem here is not with lack of autonomy in the sense that property-instances do not exist on their own, but rather in the sense that they seem to exist because certain items belonging to a different ontological category exist.
The foregoing doesn’t mean, though, that a radical physicalist reductionism is required by trope nominalism as construed here, for non-reducible and/or emergent properties can be allowed by the theory. For more details on this and the trope-theoretic reconstruction of fundamental properties on the basis of the Standard Model in general, see Morganti (2009a). See also section 5 below.
Pretending for a moment that, contrary to what was contended earlier, predicates such as ‘is red’ do instead cut the world at the joints. It is clear that only genuine tropes actually do so, while redness was excluded from the range of genuine tropes here.
This clarifies the way in which the proposed approach solves what Rodriguez-Pereyra calls the problem of the ‘many-over-one’, that is, the problem of explaining how a single object can have many properties (an important issue, as we have seen, for the resemblance nominalist).
Which is, instead, what ontologists customarily do. The internal complexity of facts, for example, is what leads Armstrong (Armstrong 1997) to postulate a world of unitary states of affairs whose constituents are property-bearing particulars and exemplified universals.
Sellars later developed this into a ‘process ontology’ which he took to provide the best way to integrate perception into the ‘scientific image’ of the world (see Seibt 1990), but this is not relevant for the argument being put forward here.
Of course, this would mean to reject the view that relations might at least in some cases be genuine properties not analysable in terms of relata and monadic properties. In the case of quantum entanglement, allegedly irreducible relations could be considered mere (albeit mathematically peculiar) statistical correlations with no ontological counterpart. See Winsberg and Fine (2003) for a suggestion in this sense.
Ladyman and Ross, for instance, argue against a “metaphysics of domestication that […] seeks to account for the world as ‘made of’ myriad ‘little things’ in roughly the same way that (some) walls are made of bricks [, that is, as a series of…] reverberating networks of […] ‘microbangings’” (Ladyman and Ross, 2007; 4). In spite of the talk of fundamental particles (and properties thereof) in the previous section, the proposal being put forward here doesn’t in any way rely on the assumption that the basic constituents are point-like ‘little things’. Nor does it assume that the fundamental building blocks are (the concrete counterparts of) monadic properties involved in ‘networks of microbangings’. In fact, an ontology of relations only, of the sort defended by Ladyman and Ross themselves, can perfectly be interpreted along the lines suggested here. The only essential thing is that the resulting ontology be intended as a nominalistic ontology.
Another worry motivated by science might have to do with the impossibility of sharp localisation of objects and properties given quantum physics. Here too, however, the nominalist doesn’t have to give up his/her whole theory but just to modify it as required. In particular, s/he will have to exclude point-likeness, or at any rate well-defined and ‘non-spread-out’ localization, from the basic features of the fundamental simples. At any rate, this shouldn’t worry us too much: for, spatial (or spatio-temporal) position is clearly a peculiar property. In particular, it is certainly an extrinsic property of things rather than an ontological constituent of them.
A different but related problem is that the direction of ontological dependence might be the opposite of what we normally think, i.e., the whole be prior to the parts. Indeed, if Schaffer (Schaffer 2010) is right that we should be priority monists and take the whole cosmos as the truly basic entity, it would no longer be possible to claim that the fundamental building blocks of reality are Sellarsian particulars. Whether or not priority monism should be taken seriously (for discussion, see Morganti 2009b), however, the fact remains that the smaller parts (even if ontologically dependent) may not correctly be analysed in terms of properties and objects. In other words, in spite of the way in which the paper has been phrased, the proposal doesn’t crucially hinge on the simple particulars in question being ontologically prior to everything else, hence ontologically fundamental.
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Morganti, M. Sellarsian Particulars. Acta Anal 27, 293–306 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0145-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0145-x