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A Puzzle for Particulars?

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Abstract

In this paper we examine a puzzle recently posed by Aaron Preston for the traditional realist assay of property (quality) instances. Consider Socrates (a red round spot) and red1—Socrates’ redness. For the traditional realist, both of these entities are concrete particulars. Further, both involve redness being `tied to’ the same bare individuator. But then it appears that red1 is duplicated in its ‘thicker’ particular (Socrates), so that it can’t be predicated of Socrates without redundancy. According to Preston, this suggests that a concrete particular and its property instances aren’t genuinely related. We argue that Preston’s proffered solution here—to treat property instances as “mental constructs”—is fraught with difficulty. We then go on to show how, by fine-tuning the nature of bare particulars, treating them as abstract modes of things rather than concrete particulars, the traditional realist can neatly evade Preston’s puzzle.

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Notes

  1. See Bradley (1946) for a classic discussion of the relation between a particular and its properties.

  2. Since this paper is set within the context of proper realism, we will not enter into the debate over the ontological status of universals. For purposes of argument, we shall simply stipulate their existence, taking no position on the question of whether they are imminent or transcendent in nature.

  3. The central difficulty, of course, is its commitment to bare particulars. For critical assessment, see Mertz (1996, 72–73). See also Mertz (2001, 2002). For recent attempts to rehabilitate bare particulars by investing them with at least some properties, see Moreland (1998), Moreland and Pickavance (2003). For replies to Moreland’s refurbished theory, see Mertz (2003) and Davis (2003, 2004a).

  4. This is not a paper in the history of philosophy. Readers interested in the history of the debate over how universals, particulars, and property instances are related should consult Mertz (1996) for a helpful overview and discussion.

  5. A reviewer for this journal objects here that the move from (1) to (2) “reduces ontology to the demands of linguistic form.” But this assumes an account of predication, s/he says, that is “too naïve.” This may be true, but it isn’t presently relevant. For we are not defending this account; we are simply reporting on Moreland’s defense of it.

  6. Even more so, if Moreland is right and all ‘ties’ to BPs are contingent. On his view, e.g., “bare particulars actually have no necessary properties...the admission that bare particulars have some properties necessarily is mistaken” (Moreland and Pickavance 2003, 8).

  7. Thus Moreland and Pickavance: “We believe that the properties said to be necessary for bare particulars are not genuine properties; these include simplicity, particularity, unrepeatability, and those of the three categories of transcendental, disjunctive, and negative properties” (Ibid, 10).

  8. See Plantinga (1974, 70).

  9. See Davis (2002, 2004b) for brief discussions of WOPs and their role as individuators.

  10. According to one of the reviewers, we must provide “empirical examples” of SAPs in order to justify including them in our ontology. But this strikes us as little more than an a priori empiricist stipulation, which we are entirely free to reject. You might as well argue contra Aristotle that substances aren’t form-matter complexes on the grounds that he doesn’t give us any “empirical examples” of forms. But this misses the point. Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter isn’t empirical; rather, it is the product of ontological assay. To be sure, what we empirically detect are substances qua wholes; it hardly follows, though, that each ontological constituent of a substance must be separately detectible. For more on the deficiencies of empiricist constraints in analytic ontology, see Moreland (2001, 150–151).

  11. See Plantinga (1974, 60–62).

  12. This is not the place for an extended defense of haecceities. For detailed discussion, see Rosenkrantz (1993).

  13. Naturally enough, however, Socrates’ property instances will depend on Socrates in both of these ways. Still, this isn’t sufficient to prove “inseparability.” For that it must be shown that neither can do without the other.

  14. According to David Armstrong, “there is nothing to bar, and much to recommend, treating property tropes and relation tropes as ways” (1997, 30, emphasis added). Compare also Lowe: “A mode is a particular way something is” (1998, 78).

  15. This is noted in van Inwagen (2001, 169).

  16. According to William Mann, for example, “all states of affairs exist, but only some of them obtain or are actual. This feature does not hold for property instances. In order for a property instance to exist, it must be actual: some existing thing must either exemplify it or be it” (1982, 457).

  17. See Bacon (1995, 1, 4). Bacon permits both ‘x’s having F-ness’ and ‘the P of x’ to make successful reference to tropes.

  18. There is a serious but, we think, unsuccessful attempt to defend a one-category ontology of relation instances in Mertz (1996, 2001, 2002). For extended critique of Mertz’s program, see Davis (2006).

  19. The subscript ‘i’ indicates that we are considering an instance of being between.

  20. See Grossmann (1992) for an expanded discussion of this point.

  21. This should make it clear that we are not advancing a species of trope theory. For on all accounts, tropes are concrete (particularized) instances of properties. On our view, however, modes are abstract particulars. They are abstract in the sense that they are non-spatio-temporal objects. But they are also particulars given that a mode such as Socrates’ being red doesn’t obtain (/fail to obtain) with respect to multiple particulars, but only Socrates. Keith Campbell (1990) has also advocated what he calls ‘abstract particulars’. However, by ‘abstract’ Campbell simply means ‘grasped by an act of mental abstraction’. For Campbell, abstract particulars are spatio-temporal concrete tropes, and thus not to be confused with modes qua abstract particulars.

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Davis, R.B., Brown, D.S. A Puzzle for Particulars?. Axiomathes 18, 49–65 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-007-9018-8

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