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Bare Particulars Laid Bare

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Abstract

Bare particulars have received a fair amount of bad press. Many find such entities to be obviously incoherent and dismiss them without much consideration. Proponents of bare particulars, on their part, have not done enough to clearly motivate and characterize bare particulars, thus leaving them open to misinterpretations. With this paper, I try to remedy this situation. I put forward a much-needed positive case for bare particulars through the four problems that they can be seen to solve—The Problem of Individuation, The Problem of Change, The Problem of Having a Property, and The Problem of Subtraction. I then distinguish and characterize three possible types of bare particulars—genuinely bare, constitutively bare, and thinly clothed—and consider how each of these cope with some classical and recent objections to bare particulars. I argue that the most troubling objections do not come from familiar quarters, but from examining how well such entities address all four of the ontological problems outlined. I ultimately conclude that the best contenders among the three types of bare particulars are the constitutively bare variety, but argue that, if they are to earn their keep, they must either share or turn over their individuating role to the ordinary particulars that they constitute.

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Notes

  1. Of course, bare particulars are not exclusive to the realist ontology. A proponent of the substance-attribute theory of tropes may wish to postulate bare particulars. This position has been attributed to Locke and C.B. Martin. Their position will not be further examined here due to the fact that bare particulars have dominantly been the domain of the realist theory of universals; also, many of the points raised within the realist context can transfer well to the substance-attribute theory of tropes.

  2. For instance, David Armstrong (1989) does this by pointing out that instances of resemblance are obvious and mind-independent “Moorean facts.”

  3. The choice of the term “thing” is deliberate. It is meant to capture our pre-theoretical way of referring to ordinary objects. The more theoretically charged terms for these entities are Armstrong’s states of affairs, thick particulars, and Moreland’s and Loux’s substances.

  4. Although I am here using an example of a universal property, universals are equally taken to include relations—these ground resemblances between pairs, triples, and n-tuples of particulars.

  5. By “genuine properties” I understand the properties that have been called “sparse” (or “natural”) as opposed to “abundant” properties. See David Armstrong (1989, 1997) for a scientific realist’s way of drawing such a distinction in terms of scientific universals.

  6. This famous example was originally presented by Black (1952).

  7. See in particular Moreland (1998), Moreland and Pickavance (2003), and Pickavance (2009).

  8. I will return to this worry below. See Sider (2006: p. 389) for criticism of this sort of objection to bare particulars. He compares it to Lewis’s (1986) problem of temporary intrinsics.

  9. Armstrong (1989, 1997) and Moreland (1998, 2001) are just some of the most prominent realists that seem committed to this thesis. See Van Inwagen (2011) for a discussion of what he takes to be a constituent ontology.

  10. Note that this conception does not a priori preclude bare particulars having further parts as long as these too are particulars without constituent properties.

  11. By the end of his paper, Connolly (2015) seems to endorse such genuinely bare particulars.

  12. Reference to this analogy can be found in Davis and Brown (2008).

  13. See Bergmann (1967: pp. 24–25, 77).

  14. See Bailey (2012: pp. 33–35).

  15. The sparse property theorist I have in mind here is a scientific realist akin to David Armstrong (1989, 1997) who thought that genuine universals are to be determined by fundamental physics. Even if one does not wish to privilege physics and takes sparse properties to come from a variety of scientific disciplines, properties such as “being a bare particular” would not qualify as a sparse property.

  16. I was originally inclined to call CBPs intrinsically bare particulars (IBPs). The reason for calling them “intrinsically bare” was because, it seemed to me, constitutive bareness and intrinsic bareness would come down to the same thing for the proponent of a realist constitutive ontology. The thought was that if intrinsic properties are understood intuitively as properties that a particular has “in and of itself,” i.e., independently of that particular’s external relations to other entities, then a bare particular that has no properties as constituents would also appear to be intrinsically bare (since it would have no non-relational properties). However, an anonymous referee for this journal has gestured at a different notion of an intrinsic property, a notion which allows (given exemplification as an external relation) for intrinsic properties to be had relationally. According to such a view, a bare particular could be constitutively bare but not intrinsically bare. Since nothing in this paper hangs on the specific definition of intrinsic property that one opts for, I have chosen to simply leave such terminology aside and focus on constitutive bareness instead.

  17. For a more detailed analysis of Bailey’s New Objection, see Wildman (2015).

  18. See, for instance, Bailey (2012: 35).

  19. This view is defended in Perovic (2014). A detailed discussion of Bradley-style arguments and unity issues cannot be carried out in this paper for it would take us too far afield. What is important to keep in mind here is that there is no obvious Bradley-style regress problem for CBPs and those who wish to raise such an objection need to make their case and not simply assume that a quick appeal to Bradley will suffice.

  20. For an extensive discussion of this objection, see Davis (2013).

  21. Here, I have in mind Moreland (1998), Pickavance (2014), and Wildman (2015), but there might be others.

  22. Alston is an exception, however. He takes CBPs to be capable of underlying all sorts of different properties; he writes: “A substratum might have underlain quite different properties from those which it in fact does and still be the same substratum; since it includes no properties, its identity does not depend on being associated with one set of universals rather than another. But a concrete individual could not possibly fail to include any of its properties and still be exactly the same individual which it is; its self-identity depends on its constituents” (Alston 1954: 257).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gregory Landini, William Robinson, and the anonymous referee for their careful feedback on the previous version of this paper. I am also grateful for illuminating discussions of bare particulars with Richard Fumerton, Laird Addis, as well as the organizers and audience of the conference on the metaphysics of properties at the University of Helsinki (2015).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Iowa, 270 English-Philosophy Building, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA

    Katarina Perović

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Perović, K. Bare Particulars Laid Bare. Acta Anal 32, 277–295 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0308-x

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