Tropes

ABSTRACT: A popular strategylor resolving Kim 's exclusion problem is to suggest that mental and physical property tropes are identical despite the non-identity of the mental and physical properties themselves. I argue that mental and physical tropes can be identified without losing the dispositional character of mentality only if a dual-character hypothesis regarding the intrinsic characters of tropes is endorsed. But even with this assumption, the causaI efficacy of the wrong dispositions is secured.RÉSUMÉ: On résout habituellement le problème de l'exclusion (...) de Kim en suggérant que les tropes de propriété mentale et physique sont identiques en dépit de la non-identité des propriétés mentales et physiques elles-mêmes. Je soutiens que les tropes mentaux et physiques peuvent être ramenés l'un à l'autre sans perdre le caractère dispositionnel de la pensée, à la condition d'approuver une hypothèse sur la nature double des caractères intrinsèques des tropes. Même en suivant cette proposition, l'efficacité causale des dispositions fausses est maintenue. (shrink)

In considering the nature of properties four controversial decisions must be made. (1) Are properties universals or tropes? (2) Are properties attributes of particulars, or are particulars just bundles of properties? (3) Are properties categorical (qualitative) in nature, or are they powers? (4) If a property attaches to a particular, is this predication contingent, or is it necessary? These choices seem to be in a great degree independent of each other. The author indicates his own choices.

This article discusses a familiar version of trope theory as opposed to a familiar version of the theory of universals, examining how these two rivals address the problem of “attribute agreement”—a problem that has been at the root of the very reason for developing these theories in the first place. The article shows that there is not much of a difference between the ways these two theories handle the problem, and in a more general way it argues that there is (...) little reason for preferring one theory over the other. It is not interested in this claim only for the sake of the debate between trope theory and the theory of universals. Indeed, the reasons why it claims that it is so difficult to choose one theory over the other can be applied to other cases as well (where they might lead to claims of metaphysical equivalence). (shrink)

This article discusses a familiar version of trope theory as opposed to a familiar version of the theory of universals, examining how these two rivals address the problem of “attribute agreement”—a problem that has been at the root of the very reason for developing these theories in the first place. The article shows that there is not much of a difference between the ways these two theories handle the problem, and in a more general way it argues that there is (...) little reason for preferring one theory over the other. It is not interested in this claim only for the sake of the debate between trope theory and the theory of universals. Indeed, the reasons why it claims that it is so difficult to choose one theory over the other can be applied to other cases as well. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that (non-presentist) endurantism is incompatible with the view that properties are universals. I do so by putting forward a very simple objection that forces the endurantist to embrace tropes, rather than universals. I do not claim that this is bad news for the endurantist—trope theory seems to me by all means more appealing than universals—rather, I would like to see this result as a further motivation to embrace tropes. I then also put forward a (more (...) controversial) reason to believe that at least some versions of perdurantism also require tropes rather than universals. (shrink)

In this paper we put forward the thesis that qualia are tropes (or qualitons), and not (universal) properties. Further, we maintain that Wittgenstein hints in this direction. We also find in Wittgenstein elements of an account of language acquisition that takes the presence of qualia as an enabling condition. We conclude by pointing out some difficulties of this view.

In this paper we advocate the thesis that qualia are tropes (or qualitons), and not (universal) properties. The main advantage of the thesis is that we can accept both the Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian assault on the given and the claim that only subjective and private states can do justice to the qualitative character of experience. We hint that if we take qualia to be tropes, we dissolve the problem of inverted qualia. We develop an account of sensory concept acquisition that (...) takes the presence of qualia as an enabling condition for learning. We argue that qualia taken to be qualitons are part of our mechanism of sensory concept acquisition. (shrink)

This paper discusses one of the major problems for resemblance nominalism, posed by Bertrand Russell in 1911–12, and often referred to as Russell’s regress. It is the problem that resemblance must either be a universal, thus refuting a thorough nominalism, or must itself resemble other resemblances to count as a resemblance, which ultimately leads to an infinite regress of resemblances. I am going to discuss two solutions that have been proposed to this problem. I will then attempt to show in (...) how far these are unsatisfactory, and propose my own solution which treats resemblance as a subject-relative phenomenon. My aim is to show that, on my account, there is no infinite regress and therefore no problem. (shrink)

A major division among ontologists has always been the one between those who believe that all entities are particular, and those who believe that at least some entities are universal. I find myself with the latter, and in this paper I offer part of the reasons why this is so. More precisely, I offer a reason why we ought to reject tropism, due to the failure of this view to account for the similarities we experience among entities. In the paper, (...) two tentative accounts are considered and rejected: one postulating the existence of a relation of primitive resemblance; the other denying the existence of any similarity. (shrink)

It is commonly held that Bradley’s regress has a solution within a trope ontology. This seems to happen when a bundle is understood as constituted by non-transferable tropes. It also seems to happen when a bundle is understood as constituted by transferable tropes related by a relational trope of compresence whose existence specifically depends on those relata. In this article I demonstrate that these proposals fail in addressing the essential question that underlies the regress, incurring in a question-begging response already (...) anticipated by Bradley. (shrink)

In this paper I examine whether the Humean denial of necessary connections between wholly distinct contingent existents poses problems for a theory of tropes. In section one I consider the substance-attribute theory of tropes. I distinguish first between three versions of the non-transferability of a trope from the substratum in which it inheres and then between two versions of the denial of necessary connections. I show that the most plausible combination of these views is consistent. In section two I consider (...) an objection to the bundle theory using the Humean doctrine that is advanced by Armstrong, and argue that it is unconvincing. In section three I return to the version of non-transferability that would cause obvious trouble for a substance-attribute theory, and less obvious trouble for a bundle theory. I argue that there is independent reason to reject this principle since, given a perdurantist metaphysic, it does not in fact secure what appeared to be its only benefit: namely that it allows tropes to act as truthmakers. I conclude that there is no objection to trope theory per se on the grounds that it brings commitment to necessary connections. (shrink)

In this ambitious work, John Heil presents a fundamental ontology (chapters 1-8) consisting of finitely many substances and their properties (which he thinks of as particular, trope-like things), together with an account of causation, truthmaking, and a chapter on relations generally. He then applies this ontology (chapters 9-12) to a number of outstanding problems about reductionism, kinds, essences, emergence, consciousness, cognition, and much else. A final chapter reprises the main points about fundamental ontology from the first chapters.

The problem of how a concrete individual survives changes of its properties has long divided the philosophical community into ‘enduratists’ and ‘perduratists’. Enduratists take the idea of a surviving individual ontologi-cally seriously. They claim that many objects we encounter in our every-day (and for that matter also scientific) life endure in time, which means that these entities are wholly present at any time at which they exist. For those who are in principle happy with the conceptual framework of our ‘everyday’ (...) or ‘folk’ ontology it is common to assume that such things as human beings, animals, and plants are endurants in this sense, and the most famous articulation of this view is to be found in Aristotle’s concept of substance. Enduring entities are to be contrasted with perdurants, such as a life of a human being or a process of growing of a plant. Think of the process of writing this very paper. The beginning of the writing, the actual phase of it and the final completion of the paper are not points at which the process of writing could be wholly present. Rather they constitute phases or parts of the process in question. This means that perduring entities have a temporal dimension whereas enduring ones do not. Most of us are prepared to accept that in the world around us there are many entities of this kind, but perdu-ratists try to defend a far stronger thesis. They claim that in fact there are only perdurants. In our everyday language it is equally common to speak of enduring objects and enduring states. But it was the first idiom which mainly attracted philosophers’ attention. Yet in this paper I want to concentrate on the sec-ond figure of speech. I will investigate, whether it is ontologically legiti-mate to distinguish between enduratist and perduratist perspectives with respect to states. (shrink)

The concept of a trope (understood as an individual property and not as a figure of speech) plays an important role in contemporary analytical metaphysics. It is, however, often far from clear what the logic of this concept really is. Indeed, there are two equally important intuitions underlying the concept of trope, two intuitions that generate two quite different conceptual frameworks. According to the first intuition, a trope is a particularised property – a property taken as an individual aspect of (...) a particular object. A trope is thus the colour of this table or the shape of this sculpture. In the light of this conception tropes are, as it were, direct abstractions from concrete individuals. According to the second intuition a trope is still such an individual (and abstract) colour or such an individual (and abstract) shape, but now it is not only abstracted from the concrete individual of which it is a trope but also taken in abstraction from the very fact that it has been abstracted this way. We can imagine that the cognitive access to these tropes is obtained by a kind of a double abstraction. All this can sound puzzling at first blush, but in what follows I hope to make the matter a little clearer. Let us anticipate briefly. On the second view, tropes are construed not so much as abstractions from concrete individuals, but rather as primitive items of which the concrete individuals are composed. Tropes so construed are, as it were, metaphysically prior to concrete individuals. We will call tropes of this kind unstructured tropes, whereas tropes conceived as aspects of individual things will be called propositional tropes. This terminology is justified because tropes understood as aspects of things seem to involve something like propositional structure, a structure that tropes conceived as primitive “building blocks” of reality definitely lack. It is sometimes believed that these two concepts of trope are nearly equivalent, that the difference between them is for the most part verbal. Yet it will turn out that there is an important ontological difference here. Propositional tropes are non-trivially propositional and unstructured tropes are non-trivially deprived of such a structure (althought not necessarily deprived of any dependence-links with respect to other tropes). It will be argued that tropes are metaphysically interesting only on the second conception (i.e., as primitive, unstructured items), whereas only on the first conception (tropes as propositionally structured entities) can they function as semantically efficient truthmakers. The moral of the paper will be that our trust in tropes must be mitigated. A trope ontology could plausibly be viewed as a serious metaphysical alternative, but its semantical possibilities should not be exaggerated. (shrink)

Whereas the Humean accounts of causality in terms of contiguity, temporal priority, constant conjunction, and contingency face difficulties of one sort, the dispositional explanations of causality in terms of reciprocity, simultaneity, ubiquity, and holism seem to meet difficulties of another sort. But the difficulties which dispositionalism faces may be dissipated if one can appeal consistently to the logic of naturalism, rather than to the grammar of an implicit dualism, for example, as it is illustrated when G. Molnar tried to advance (...) the analogy between the mental intentionality and the physical intentionality.The notion of integration is taken to allow a conceptual space for naturalism of one kind. It may be expressed in the thesis that there is integrationality in any entity like dispositions, such that the integrationality is a power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others. The thesis would help to see how dispositions can be intentional, how the no... (shrink)

As a first stab, call a property recurrent if it can be possessed by more than one object, and nonrecurrent if it can be possessed by at most one object. The question whether Aristotle holds that there are nonrecurrent properties has spawned a lively and ongoing debate among commentators over the last forty-five years. One source of textual evidence in the Categories, drawn on in this debate, is Aristotle’s claim that certain properties are inseparable from what they are in. Here (...) the point of contention is whether this commits Aristotle to holding that these properties are inseparable from individuals, since it is commonly held that a property is nonrecurrent, if it is inseparable from an individual. I argue that this evidence is neutral on the question whether there are nonrecurrent properties in Aristotle. One of my aims here is to disentangle the question of recurrence from local issues of individuality and universality in the Categories. But another aim is to turn from the textual considerations, which have dominated the debate, to broader methodological considerations. It is a shared assumption among all those who look to textual evidence from the Categories, so to decide whether Aristotle believes there are nonrecurrent properties, that in this work Aristotle is engaged in a project where the question of recurrence is relevant. I argue that Aristotle’s concerns in the Categories are disjoint from the question of recurrence, and so this shared assumption is false. (shrink)

Once we assume that objects are bundles of tropes, we want to know how the latter cohere. Are they held together by a substratum, are they linked by external relations or do they cling to one another by internal relations? This paper begins by exploring the reasons for eliminating the first two suggestions. Defending that the third option can be made plausible, it advances the following thesis: Maintaining that tropes are held in a compresence by appropriately qualified internal relations avoids (...) the consequence that such properties will be essential to the object. The specific targets of the second part of the paper include, first, a more precise description of the notion of a cohesive internal relation, and second, an explanation of how alteration is possible in an object the particular properties of which hold together by qualified internal relations. (shrink)

Properties and objects are everywhere, but remain a philosophical mystery. Douglas Ehring argues that the idea of tropes--properties and relations understood as particulars--provides the best foundation for a metaphysical account of properties and objects. He develops and defends a new theory of trope nominalism.

'Natural class' trope nominalism makes a trope's being of a certain sort--its nature--a matter of its membership in a certain natural class of actual tropes. It has been objected that on this theory had even a single member of the class of red tropes not existed, for example, then the type 'being red' would not have been instantiated and nothing would have been red. I argue that natural class trope nominalism can avoid this implication by way of counterpart theory as (...) applied to properties. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider an objection to ``natural class''trope nominalism, the view that a trope's nature isdetermined by its membership in a natural class of tropes.The objection is that natural class trope nominalismis inconsistent with causes' being efficacious invirtue of having tropes of a certain type. I arguethat if natural class trope nominalism is combinedwith property counterpart theory, then this objectioncan be rebutted.

Donald C. Williams was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. This book will be the definitive source for his highly original work, which did much to bring metaphysics back into fashion. It presents six classic papers and six previously unpublished, revealing his full philosophical vision for the first time.

The concept of instantiation is realized differently across a variety of metaphysical theories. A certain realization of the concept in a given theory depends on what roles are specified and associated with the concept and its corresponding term as well as what entities are suited to fill those roles. In this paper, the classic realization of the concept of instantiation in a one-category ontology of abstract particulars or tropes is articulated in a novel way and defended against unaddressed objections.

In the middle of last century metaphysics was widely criticized, ridiculed, and committed to the flames. During this period a handful of philosophers, against several anti-metaphysical trends, defended metaphysics and articulated novel metaphysical doctrines. Donald C. Williams was one of these philosophers. But while his contributions to metaphysics are well known his defence of metaphysics is not and yet it played a key part in the development and revival of metaphysics. In this paper I present his defence of metaphysics in (...) its historical context. I also show how his defence is relevant in response to recent attacks on metaphysics. (shrink)

The revival of analytic metaphysics in the latter half of the twentieth century is typically understood as a consequence of the critiques of logical positivism, Quine’s naturalization of ontology, Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, clarifications of modal notions in logic, and the theoretical exploitation of possible worlds. However, this explanation overlooks the work of metaphysicians at the height of positivism and linguisticism that affected metaphysics of the late twentieth century. Donald C. Williams is one such philosopher. In this paper I explain (...) how Williams’s fundamental ontology and philosophy of time influenced in part the early formation of David Lewis’s metaphysics. Thus, Williams played an important role in the revival of analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

It is argued that physical (and not inherently psychical) properties are insufficient to constitute all else. Specifically they cannot constitute an instance (K1) of our knowledge that the number of existing things is at least one. This employs a new version of entry by entailment: Every fact as to the presence of a constituted trope is entailed by facts about the presence of the ontologically basic, where a property is ontologically basic if and only if the fact of its presence (...) is not entailed (even allowing exhaustive definitions of all tropes in terms of their ultimate constituents) by facts about the presence of things non-identical to it. Existence is a mind-independent presence. Things can be present (to mind) as opposed to existing but must be accompanied by the presence of all of their parts and of anything else that their presence might entail. This includes some existing thing in the case that knowledge that something exists is present, since it is analytic that knowledge cannot be of what is not the case. Purely dynamical properties cannot exist apart from instances of some other property kind (on pain of regress as to what moves). Material properties can make a difference to cognitive states only in virtue of differences they can make to dynamical properties. Thus, any cognitive state present in some dynamical and material scenario must be present in an equivalent purely dynamical scenario, which cannot exist. Hence: 1) There can be no knowledge of existence, or thus trope K1, in a purely dynamical scenario. 2) There can thus neither be a trope K1 if only dynamical and material properties (and what they constitute) are present. So because there is a trope K1, there are one or more ontologically basic properties which are not dynamical or material. It is further argued that nothing ontologically basic is per se (directly and non-obscurely) conceivable except as psychicality or a categorical basis of a disposition to change or constancy (respectively, dynamism and materiality). Thus at least one ontologically basic property is either psychical or not per se conceivable. The latter proposition has less merit. (shrink)

How is it that, as fiction readers, we are nonplussed by J. K. Rowling's prescription to imagine Ronan, Bane, and Magorian, three different centaurs of the Forbidden Forrest at Hogwarts? It is usually held in the philosophical literature on fictional discourse that singular imaginings of fictional objects are impossible, given the blatant nonexistence of such objects. In this paper, I have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to show that, without being committed to Meinongeanism, we can explain the phenomenon (...) of singular imaginings of different nonexistents of the same kind; while, at the same time, to attribute this position to Thomas Reid, thus correcting some misunderstandings of his view on imagination. (shrink)

Either from concrete examples such as tomatoes on a plate, an egg carton full of eggs and so on, or simply because of the braces notation, we come to have some intuitions about the sorts of things sets might be. (See Maddy 1990.) First we tend to think of a set of particulars as itself a particular thing.. Second, even after the distinction between settheory and mereology has been carefully explained we tend to think of the members of a set (...) as in some sense parts. And third we tend to think that there is something represented by the braces. Now if there were experts who got their intuitions from elsewhere then we could discard these rather crude ideas about egg cartons and so on. But I suspect the intuitions of experts are, just like those of the rest of us, based on notation and simple examples. (shrink)

In this work, I argue that creative metaphors are formed when some persistent problem, caused by an inadequacy in preexisting knowledge, descends into the collective unconscious, is reconfigured unconsciously in novel ways, and then reemerges back into consciousness where the impasse is resolved by the metaphorical expression of new knowledge. To develop this position, I (1) review and critique some well-known language-based studies of metaphor, (2) summarize psychoanalytic and depth psychological approaches to the psyche as one way to overcome the (...) shortcomings of the language-based scholarship, (3) relate C. G. Jung's account of the psyche and his related notion of synchronicity to creative metaphors, (4) graft a quantum physics approach to material reality back onto Jung's work as a provisional structure of the collective unconscious, and finally, (5) offer some suggestions about how creative metaphors might work psychologically. (shrink)