It is widely agreed that properties play causal roles: they capture the causal powers of things. But do properties have their causal roles essentially? David Lewis did not think so. He adhered to the doctrine of quidditism, namely the doctrine that the identity of properties is primitive and that they can trade their causal roles. Quidditism is controversial. But Lewis did not see why he should want to reject it. He knew that he could avoid quidditism on the cheap by (...) treating individuals and properties alike in rejecting transworld multilocation of properties and endorsing a counterpart theory for properties. But he did not see why he should want to do so. In this article, I argue that Lewis should have wanted to endorse a counterpart theory for properties in order to reject quidditism. My argument concerns resemblance relations among properties. Another constitutive role of properties is that they capture objective resemblances between their instances. The premises of my argument are intuitive claims about resemblances among some properties that Lewis held on Humean grounds. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A restricted interpretation of Humean methodology understands his experimentalism solely in terms of reducing epistemic statements to private sensory impressions accessible via introspection. My aim is to revise this interpretation by means of criticizing the connection it establishes between the maxim of not going beyond experience and the copy principle. I will show that this interpretation is inconsistent with the way Hume conceives the experimental method, since there is textual evidence to affirm that experience should not be understood in (...) terms of sensory impressions only, and that the science of human nature is not restricted to the study of the mental contents only, but it is nourished in the same way by the observation of social interaction. Finally, I will argue that the method Hume proposes does not prevent intersubjective verification of the empirical evidence, since the principle of sympathy enables the communication of mental states, which makes them devoid of their private character. (shrink)