last revised September 23rd, 2004.Other reading: Lowe deals with these issues in his chapter 19; Mackie, Problems from Locke, ch. 4, especially § 6-9, has a brisk discussion; Strawson, Individuals Part II, is a lengthy discussion of questions related to ours. In the SEP, Chris Swoyer has a very comprehensive article on properties.
Whatever we deal with (think of, interact with, ...) is some way or other: red, human, ferocious, divisible by 3, .... And these are ways that other stuff we deal with might be too. How should we conceive of this elementary fact?
Loux characterises the elementary, pre-philosophical fact thus: "There are, then, objective similarities among things. Prior to our classifying them in the ways we do, the familiar objects of the everyday world agree in their characteristics, features, or attributes" (21).
So the issue is whether there is any further fact that underlies, explains, grounds the pre-philosophical fact that whatever there is is some way or other.
As Loux says, Plato's Forms are the primordial positive answer to the question. Ignoring a lot of the Platonic scaffolding, Loux sees Plato and any other realist about universals as committed to this schema: where a number of objects, a ... n, agree in attribute, there is a thing, φ, and a relation, R, such that each of a ... n bears R to φ and it is in virtue of bearing such a relation that the objects agree in attribute.
Traditionally, opposed to such realism is nominalism. Loux lets this label cover both those who offer a very different story from the Platonic schema and those who reject the very attempt to get beyond the pre-philosophical fact. He deals with nominalism in chapter 2.
Loux focusses on two issues where it is claimed realism provides a fruitful account. But he claims these are basically challenges to opponents to show how the facts they appeal to could be explained nominalistically.
One fundamental type of sentence is of the subject-predicate form.
The subject expression picks out a particular and the predicate
expression characterises it in some way. Consider two claims Fa and Fb. If these are true, the subjects, names, a and b must refer to individuals, and the predicate F
must equally convey something possessed by those individuals, but
something they share: precisely the realist Platonic schema. Some have
taken predicates as names of universals in the same way as subject
expressions are names of individuals, but Loux argues that this is
mistaken (a name can function as a subject expression, but typical
predicate expressions cannot [red is atypical and Loux claims
the word is ambiguous, sometimes a noun that names a colour, other
times an adjective that doesn't name anything]). Instead he invokes the
idea of a predicate expressing or connoting a
universal, and supports this by observing that we can paraphrase many
simple subject-predicate sentences in ways that explicitly mention a
universal: e.g.,
We have many pairs such as courage/courageous, circularity/circular where one term seems to refer to a property or kind that the other connotes. Realism endorses this appearance, claiming that it is necessary to accept the Platonic schema if we are to provide a satisfactory account of the meaning of many ordinary sentences in which abstract singular terms appear as subjects. As Loux points out, there are many other sentences, not involving abstract singular terms, that do, however, equally seem to require universals to exist if we are to understand how they are true.
Loux now muddies the waters by noting that no realism can be as straightforward as has been characterised. There have in fact been various alternative versions of the theory, each with different restrictions on how widely the realist story is to be told.
Loux's first point is that no realism could be completely unrestricted. His reason is an adaptation of Russell's famous paradox for set theory to the case of properties. If there is a universal for every nonequivalent predicate term then there is a universal for does not exemplify itself. (It is true that Bill Clinton does not exemplify itself; false that the property of being incorporeal does not exemplify itself.) Now if there is a universal, being non-selfexemplifying, either it is non-selfexemplifying or it isn't. Suppose it does exemplify itself; then it doesn't exemplify itself. Suppose it doesn't exemplify itself; then it does. So there cannot be such a universal.
Loux next considers some arguments that might lead to further restrictions on the realist view. They share the idea that unrestricted realism leads one to vicious infinite regresses.
You should note here the similarity between this argument and Plato's "Third Man" objection to the Forms.
Loux observes that while nominalists have used the argument to reject realism, realists have often countered by restricting their account to exclude exemplification. The fact that several ordered pairs exemplify R-ness is not to be explained by invoking a further universal.
Loux' own preferred response is, however, that the regress here is not vicious. The realist offers to explain a case of attribute possession, Rab, and he does so. That his explanans commits him to another case of attribute possession is not a problem; it merely reflects a fact about explanation in general (I ask why this happened; you tell me that happened). Realists weren't trying to get rid of subject-predicate sentences. And their opponents cannot do that either. (My own take on this point is that it supports one kind of nominalism that Loux considers later, the kind that says we cannot analyse away predication.)
But one can also deny that there are any regresses here, since it would appear that to admit the regress is to postulate an infinity of facts somehow behind each simple fact. On this view, talk about exemplifying F is just another way of saying F and so commits us to no more than that does. It is articulating the original fact more clearly rather than invoking a further fact.
While this argument has loomed large in discussions of these issues, Loux seems to see it as no more threatening than the previous regress. We have, after all, explained the monadic fact we started from as much as we can explain anything.
Loux notes that most realists have responded to this argument by denying that exemplification is a relation. So instead of talking, as we have, of exemplification as a relation between objects/universals and universals, we should speak of it as a 'tie' or 'nexus' where the point is to emphasise "the nonrelational nature of the linkage this notion provides" (41). If this is acceptable, it mitigates the ad hocness of the restriction required by Russell's paradox. But for me, at least, the impression of arbitrary legislation to avoid unpleasant consequences prevails.
Swoyer offers what seems a different version of Bradley's regress, and makes some further comments on the nexus idea that may be helpful:
Suppose that the individual a has the property F. For a to instantiate F it must be linked to F by a relation of instantiation, I. But (here's where the trouble begins), this requires a further pair of relations, R1 and R2, one to connect a to I and a second to connect I to F. This in turn requires four additional relations to bind R1 and R2 to the things that they are supposed to relate, then eight further relations to fasten these four relations to their relata, and so on without end. It is sometimes suggested that the regress is innocuous, but the problem isn't simply that there is a regress. The problem is that at each "stage" further relations are required, but they are never able to link their would-be relata. The difficulty is that nothing ever gets connected to anything else.
The only way to avoid this difficulty is to insist that instantiation is not a relation, at least not a normal one. Some philosophers hold that it is a sui generis linkage that hooks things up without intermediaries. Strawson (1959), following W. E. Johnson, calls it a non-relational tie; others stress that it is a mode of predication. It may even be that there is no such thing as instantiation at all and that talk of it is just a misleading figure of speech. At this point it is natural to resort to metaphors like Frege's claim that properties have gaps that can be filled by objects or the early Wittgenstein's suggestion (if we read him as a realist about properties) that objects and properties can be hooked together like links in a chain. Broad likened instantiation to Metaphysical Glue, noting that when we glue two sheets of paper together we don't need additional glue, or mortar, or some other adhesive to bind the glue to the paper (Broad 1933, p. 85). Glue just sticks. And instantiation just relates. It is metaphysically self-adhesive.
But there are problems here. There are very few properly definable terms in natural language. And where they do exist there are often alternative structures of primitives and defined terms, choice among which is apparently arbitrary.
Issues here are again what to make of the sense of ordinary sentences that speak of (what may be) uninstantiated properties or relations, and the degree to which the Platonist account is committed to our ability to know about a world radically different from that we experience (Loux suggests that it isn't).
© Ed Brandon, 2004.
last revised September 23rd, 2004.
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