Edwards - Properties

Table of Contents

Key Concepts in Philosophy Series

Copyright Douglas Edwards 2014

The right of Douglas Edwards to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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To Mum and Dad

Preface

The world is populated with many different objects: tables, chairs, roses, fire engines, blades of grass and human beings, to name just a few, each occupying its own special region of spacetime. When we distinguish between them, though, we often don't just make use of the idea that they exist in different locations; we also talk about the different features, attributes, or properties that they have. For instance, you and I have the property of being human, whereas tables and chairs do not. Roses and fire engines have the property of being red (or at least some do), whereas blades of grass do not. Conversely, the properties that objects have also help us to make sense of the ways in which distinct objects are similar: roses and fire engines are similar in an important way, as you and I are, because of the properties they and we share. However, positing the existence of properties immediately raises some interesting metaphysical questions. For example, how do we make sense of the idea that the redness of a fire engine is the same as the redness of a rose, when the fire engine and the rose exist in different places? Does this mean that one thing the property redness exists in different places at once, and, if so, how?

Understanding properties has been one of the main tasks of metaphysicians since the ancients, and a number of innovative proposals have been put forward. The aim of this book is to provide an accessible introduction to the main theories of properties: the view that properties are universals; the view that properties are constructed from tropes; and the view that properties are classes or sets of objects. We will chart these central positions in the debate and more, and we will note their strengths and weaknesses. We will address the main challenge to views that take properties seriously that posed by Quine which argues, contrary to what we said above, that we do not need properties to do any interesting explanatory work. We will address the question of what a theory of properties is intended to do, and we will take seriously the question of whether any single theory of properties is able to account for all the features that properties have been taken to have. We will also explore the connections between debates about properties and debates elsewhere in philosophy.

The first chapter introduces the topic under discussion and explores the main reasons for positing the existence of properties, including the one over many argument. It then raises the question of what the constraints on a theory of properties are by considering the various jobs properties have been taken to do, before making some terminological distinctions. The second chapter discusses perhaps the most well-known view of properties, namely the view that properties are universals, and assesses both the transcendental view, attributed to Plato and developed by Bertrand Russell, and the immanent view, attributed to Aristotle and developed recently by David Armstrong. The third chapter introduces and assesses the view that properties are to be accounted for in terms of tropes. The fourth chapter assesses Quine's scepticism about properties and addresses his challenge to the theories under discussion in this book, which states that there are no properties at all. The fifth chapter explores various forms of nominalism about properties, particularly predicate nominalism, concept nominalism, class nominalism, mereological nominalism and resemblance nominalism. These views are all varieties of nominalism, as they deny or at least claim to deny the existence of universals or tropes. The sixth chapter explores pluralist approaches to properties, in particular David Lewis's influential distinction between abundant and natural properties. Finally, the seventh chapter examines some of the roles properties have in other debates in philosophy and discusses how the different accounts of properties explored in previous chapters might be affected.

As will become clear as we go through the book, we will rarely come across knock-down arguments against a view. Instead, the pattern that will become familiar is that each view has its own benefits and its own costs. Accordingly, the evaluation of competing views often takes the form of a cost/benefit analysis, and the choice of the view to adopt may not be particularly clear-cut. This is especially so in the case of the views under discussion in are designed to rectify this matter somewhat by attempting to show that incorporating different aspects of the previously discussed views into a new conception of properties can yield some progress. Whether they ultimately succeed, however, is a matter for debate.

I have approached this book as one does a series of philosophy lectures, in that the aim is to give a good understanding of the topic and to leave the audience primed and ready to investigate the subject, and the texts discussed, in greater depth. To this end I have included further reading lists at the end of each chapter, in addition to references throughout the main text. Many of the key texts in twentieth-century work on properties that are discussed are collected in D. H. Mellor and Alex Oliver's edited volume Properties (Oxford University Press, 1997). To make it easier for those who are using that book to find references in the text, for all the quotations from works reprinted in it I have included apart from the page number of the original text a reference to the corresponding page number in Mellor and Oliver. In some cases where the location of the original articles is hard to come by, I only have used the references to page numbers in the reprinted versions in the Mellor and Oliver volume, but included the full references in the bibliography.