Abstract

Many realists and nominalists, guided by a specific interpretation of the nature of the debate concerning the existence of properties, agree in holding that predicative sentences of the form «a is F» – whereas the schematic letters «a» and «F» stand for, respectively, a name of a particular and a general term –, taken by themselves alone, don’t commit us to the existence of properties. In this paper I’ll take into account the main versions of realism and nominalism that assume the correctness of that thesis; then, moving from what I call “the argument from the anaphoric anomaly”, I’ll bring them into question pointing out that their debate is misguided.