Suppose that there were only four possible properties: heat, cold, dryness and moistness. Then the Platonic-sounding sentences that trouble nominalists could have their Platonic commitments reduced away. For instance, van Inwagen set the challenge of how to get rid of the commitment to properties (or features) in:
- Spiders and insects have a feature in common.
- Spiders and insects are both hot, or spiders and insects are both cold, or spiders and insects are both dry, or spiders and insects are both moist.
- All but one property are instantiated
- Something is hot and something is cold and something is dry but nothing is moist, or something is hot and something is cold and something is moist but nothing is dry, or something is hot and something is dry and something is moist but nothing is cold, or something is cold and something is dry and something is moist but nothing is hot.
And of course there are more than four properties. But as long as there is a finite list of all the possible properties, the above solution works. But in fact the solution works even if the list is infinite, as long as (a) we can form infinite conjunctions (or infinite disjunctions—they are interdefinable by de Morgan) and (b) the list of properties does not vary between possible worlds. Fortunately in regard to (b), the default view among Platonists seems to be that properties are necessary beings.
My suspicion is that this "solution" would deprive (meta)physical theories of explanatory power. For suppose we wanted to say, "For every property there is a (different) opposite property" -- we could perhaps come up with something logically equivalent (a long disjunction) but we would have abandoned any kind of explanatory ambition.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, and that's a nice example. I have van Inwagen in mind here as a target, though, and he has no explanatory ambitions of any kind in his Platonism.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe your objection can still be run. One way is to say that my story may work for sentences where properties appear in two predicates, the instantiation predicate ("Smith has roundness") and the identity predicate ("green = blue"). But there are many more predicates one may apply to properties. How do we run the story about those? The worry is that for each such predicate, we need to hard-code which properties (or tuples of properties) satisfy it, and that makes the theory even more unwieldy.
Divide up predicates that apply to properties into two classes. Type I predicates are such that the applicability of the predicate to properties can be defined in terms of identity and instantiation and predicates applying to things. Type II predicates is everything else.
A potential example of a Type I predicate is "are incompatible". "P and Q are incompatible iff necessarily: (x)~(x has P and x has Q)." But there seem to be predicates of Type II. E.g., "are similar". That two properties are similar doesn't mean that their instances similar.
Maybe one can handle some or all Type II predicates with a "qua" connective, but that's pretty hairy. (Thus P and Q are similar iff necessarily:(x)(y)(x has P and y has Q implies x qua having P is similar to y having Q. But even here there are going to be technical difficulties. What if P and Q can't be instantiated in the same world?)
I think there is an important lesson here. The Quinean discussion of ontological commitment is focused on quantifiers and identity. But discussion of the applicability of predicates other than identity (e.g., "are similar" or "are opposite") may be just as important, or even more important, for particular reductive proposals.
ReplyDelete1. Dr. Pruss, what’s your opinion on the nominalist view that we only have the vocabulary that we use that seems to commit us to universals because it enables us to say things that would be very tedious to say if we didn’t have that new vocabulary, but the new vocabulary doesn’t carry any ontological commitments with it.
ReplyDeleteFor example, try saying “everything the Pope says is true.” Try saying that if you don’t have the truth predicate. What you will end up saying that’s kind of infinitely complicated. If the Pope says grass is green then grass is green and if the Pope says grass is purple then grass is purple and so on. The purpose of the truth predicate is just to avoid having to say. It make us possible to say things that that we couldn’t say because we couldn’t express that infinite conjunction. And the talk about properties would be the same. The reason why we have nominalization and talk about is just to make it possible to say certain kings of things that otherwise we would end up expressing using infinite conjunctions and infinite disjunctions but not any ontology that goes with it.
2. Suppose we’ve got two red balls. There’s a much more informative though rather more complicated explanation about the the surface reflectance properties of the balls and the transmission photons to the eyes of the perceiver and the processing that’s going on in their brain and so on. That’s stuff is definitely there, it’s common on any sensible picture about what’s going on. And once you think about all of that picture, the need to appeal to universals, the universal of redness to explain the judgements about similarities is going to be redundant because we’ll get a much more complete explanation out of the kind of underlying scientific theory’s in that case.
(Retype due to some typos) 1. Your opinion on the nominalist view that we only have the vocabulary that we use that seems to commit us to universals because it enables us to say things that would be very tedious to say if we didn’t have that new vocabulary, but the new vocabulary doesn’t carry any ontological commitments with it.
ReplyDeleteFor example, try saying “everything the Pope says is true.” Try saying that if you don’t have the truth predicate. What you will end up saying is something that’s kind of infinitely complicated. If the Pope says grass is green then grass is green and if the Pope says grass is purple then grass is purple and so on. The purpose of the truth predicate is just to avoid having to say. It make us possible to say things that that we couldn’t say because we couldn’t express that infinite conjunction. And the talk about properties would be the same. The reason why we have nominalization and talk about properties is just to make it possible to say certain kinds of things that otherwise we would end up expressing using infinite conjunctions and infinite disjunctions but not any ontology that goes along with it.
2. Suppose we’ve got two red balls and what we’re gonna say is that the redness is the same in the two balls. There’s a much more informative though rather more complicated explanation about the surface reflectance properties of the balls and the transmission photons to the eyes of the perceiver and the processing that’s going on in their brain and so on. That’s stuff is definitely there, it’s common on any sensible picture about what’s going on. And once you think about all of that picture, the need to appeal to universals, the universal of redness to explain the judgements about similarities is going to be redundant because we’ll get a much more complete explanation out of the kind of underlying scientific theory’s in that case.
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Delete^thoughts on this Dr. Pruss?
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