Universals

James Porter Moreland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317490005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Things are particulars and their qualities are universals, but do universals have an existence distinct from the particular things describable by those terms? And what must be their nature if they do? This book provides a careful and assured survey of the central issues of debate surrounding universals, in particular those issues that have been a crucial part of the emergence of contemporary analytic ontology. The book begins with a taxonomy of extreme nominalist, moderate nominalist, and realist positions on properties, and outlines the way each handles the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and abstract reference. The debate about properties and philosophical naturalism is also examined. Different forms of extreme nominalism, moderate nominalism, and minimalist realism are critiqued. Later chapters defend a traditional realist view of universals and examine the objections to realism from various infinite regresses, the difficulties in stating identity conditions for properties, and problems with realist accounts of knowledge of abstract objects. In addition, the debate between Platonists and Aristotelians is examined alongside a discussion of the relationship between properties and an adequate theory of existence. The book's final chapter explores the problem of individuating particulars. The book makes accessible a difficult topic without blunting the sophistication of argument required by a more advanced readership.

1 The problem(s) of universals

Along with the metaphysics of substance, the problem of universals is the paradigm case of a perennial issue in the history of philosophy. The problem of universals is actually a set of related issues involving the ontological status of properties. Prima facie, it would seem that properties exist. Indeed, one of the most obvious facts about the world is that it consists of individual things that have properties and that stand in relations to other things.¹ It would also seem that several objects can have the same property; for example, several things can possess the same shade of red. But both the existence and nature of properties have long been a matter of dispute and the problem of universals is the name for the issues central to this debate.

Those who accept the existence of universals have appealed to a number of phenomena to make their case (e.g. the meaningfulness of language, the lawlike nature of causation, the inter-subjectivity of thinking, our ability to classify and recognize new entities, gradation and the need for perfect standards or ideal paradigms). However, historically, the problem of universals has been mainly about the “One and Many” (a.k.a. “One over Many”, “One in Many”), which involves giving an account of the unity of natural classes. To illustrate, consider the following words: RED, RED, BLUE. How many words are in the sequence? Two answers seem possible: either two or three words. There would seem to be two word types and three word tokens, where a type is a kind of word that can be instanced in different places and a token is a specific instance of a type. If we form a set containing the first two tokens, the unity of the set would seem to be grounded in the fact that both tokens have the same word type in common. Similarly, if we had seven red and three blue balls, there would be a sense in which we would have two different colours and another sense in which we would have ten different colours. There would be two kinds of colours — red and blue — and ten instances of colour. A set containing the seven red balls seems to exhibit a natural unity in that each ball has something in common not possessed by any of the blue balls; namely, the colour red. Issues and options regarding the One and Many have formed the core of the problem of universals since the time of Plato. What are we to make of sameness of type? What distinguishes a class of tokens that mark off a real natural class from a contrived artificial class?² What grounds class membership in natural classes?

However, since the problem of universals is about the ontological status of properties, it goes beyond the One and Many and includes these questions:

• Do properties exist?
• If properties exist, are they universals or particulars?
• If properties are universals, are they abstract objects?
• What is the relationship between a property and the thing that has it? Is the property in what has it and, if so, what sort of “in” is this (spatial, non-spatial)?
• If properties exist, can they exist even if no particulars exemplify them?
• In addition to properties and concrete particulars (roughly, individual things like balls and baboons), are there property-instances? If so, are they simple or complex entities?
• If properties are universals, what account can be given of the individuation of two entities that have all their pure properties in common?³

The chapters to follow take up each of these questions along with other topics central to debates about universals. The remainder of this chapter highlights central issues and distinctions relevant to debates about properties.

Issues and options regarding the ontological status of properties

Attribute-agreement and extreme nominalism, moderate nominalism and realism

The issues and options in the debate about exemplification can be clarified by an example of what is called attribute-agreement.⁴ Suppose we have before us two round red spots. Suppose further that each spot has the “same” shade of red and the same roundness.⁵ Let us call the two spots Socrates and Plato. Let us also use red₁ and red₂ to stand for the redness of Socrates and the redness of Plato, respectively.

Attribute-agreement can be interpreted in three general ways. First, there is an interpretation called extreme nominalism. There are several varieties of extreme nominalism, but they all exclude attributes as they are construed by the realists or nominalists. The extreme nominalist offers this reductive analysis:

a has the attribute F, if and only if, Q.

Different versions of extreme nominalism will spell out Q in different ways.⁶ A predicate extreme nominalist parses Q as “the predicate ‘F’ is true of a”; a class extreme nominalist as “a is a member of the class of F-things”; and a concept extreme nominalist as “a falls under the concept F”. The fundamental feature of this account of attribute-agreement and exemplification is its denial that attributes form an additional category of being distinct from the things that have them (unless, of course, a new category other than that of property is introduced, to which properties are reduced, e.g. predicates, classes, concepts, etc.). Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars and Anthony Quinton are important extreme nominalists.

The second major interpretation of attribute-agreement is called moderate nominalism. A moderate nominalist acknowledges the existence of qualities but denies that attribute-agreement is to be explained along realist lines where qualities are universals. The moderate nominalist denies that the redness of Socrates is numerically identical to the redness of Plato. Socrates and Plato may both have a determinate shade of colour that is “exactly alike”. But the two do not share the same numerically identical quality. Plato and Socrates each has a particular entity that is not multiply exemplifiable; a little red. Quality instances construed along moderate nominalist lines have various labels: “tropes”,⁷ “abstract particulars”,⁸ “perfect particulars”,⁹ “cases”,¹⁰ “aspects”,¹¹ “unit properties”,¹² “property instances”¹³ and “moments”.¹⁴ G. F. Stout, D. C. Williams, C. B. Martin, and Keith Campbell are four important contemporary nominalists.

Finally, there are realist treatments of attribute-agreement. There are different varieties of realism. For example, Aristotelian realists disagree with Platonic realists over the question of the existence of uninstantiated universals. Traditional realists like Reinhardt Grossmann hold universals to be non-spatio-temporal abstract entities and realists like D. M. Armstrong take them to be multiply spatialized entities, located at the various places where the things exemplifying them exist. But realists are agreed in holding that when attribute-agreement obtains, it is to be explained by an appeal to universals. The realist will argue that Socrates and Plato both “partake of”, “exemplify” or “instantiate” a single attribute: redness. Thus, properties are universals that are multiply-exemplifiable, and attribute-agreement involves various particulars having literally the same property. Recent important realists are Edmund Husserl, Gustav Bergmann, Reinhardt Grossmann, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Michael Loux and D. M. Armstrong.

Three important phenomena relevant to the debate about properties

As mentioned above, from the time of Plato realists have offered a wide variety of arguments in support of their views. However, three phenomena have been most important in the debate: predication, exact similarity and abstract reference.¹⁵ In each case, the realist appeals to what appear to be obvious facts, claims that they have a straightforward and powerful way of accounting for those facts and challenges the extreme nominalist and moderate nominalist to come up with an equally plausible analysis. In this way, the realist believes that the burden of proof is on the other two schools of thought.

To probe the dialectic more deeply and relate these three phenomena to the traditional problem of universals (the unity of natural classes), let us begin with predication by considering the following true statements:

• (1) Socrates is red.
• (2) Plato is red.

Realists have a very powerful, direct way of explaining the truth of sentences like (1) and (2): Socrates and Plato, have a property —redness — and the exemplification of redness by Socrates and Plato, respectively, is what grounds the truth of (1) and (2). Moreover, in relation to the One and Many, the redness of Socrates is identical to the redness of Plato and, more generally, redness is what grounds the unity of the natural class of red entities. Entities like Socrates and Plato are members of this (non-arbitrary) class because each has the same property which grounds class membership. A blue spot is not a member of this class because it fails to exemplify the relevant property. In light of the realist analysis of sentences like (1) and (2), the realist challenges the extreme and moderate nominalist to come up with alternative accounts that are adequate to explain the truth of sentences of this sort.

The second argument for realism focuses on certain obvious facts about resemblance. Many particulars in the world exactly resemble other particulars in various ways and these various ways constitute the respects of resemblance that obtain between or among the particulars. For example, Socrates and Plato are exactly similar to each other in being red. Moreover, the exact similarity between two objects can be made the object of an intuitive act; the resemblance itself can be made an object of direct awareness, it can be concretely distinguished, talked about and known. The realist will explain these facts by grounding exact similarity in a property exemplified by the two resembling entities that constitutes their respect of resemblance. Thus, the resemblance between Socrates and Plato mentioned above is grounded in the fact that both Socrates and Plato share the very same property, redness, and redness is the respect in which they exactly resemble each other. Related to the One and Many, the unity of a class of exactly resembling red objects is grounded in a numerically identical property — redness —exemplified by each class member while failing to be exemplified by objects excluded from class membership and that constitutes the respect in which all members of the class resemble each other. The realist challenges the extreme and moderate nominalist to offer a better explanation of exact similarity.

The third argument for realism involves the phenomenon of abstract reference or, to state it non-linguistically, the fact that properties themselves have properties and stand in relations to other properties. Moreover, these facts appear to be necessary, unchanging ones in that they run throughout possible worlds. For example, consider the following sentences:

• (3) Red resembles orange more than it resembles blue.
• (4) Red is a colour.

The realist has a straightforward, powerful explanation for the truth of sentences (3) and (4) and the states of affairs they describe. They can claim that the key terms in (3) and (4), e.g. the subject term in (4), are abstract singular terms that refer to universals. This can be made explicit by the following paraphrases:

• (3a) Redness resembles orangeness more that it resembles blueness.
• (4a) Redness is a colour.

The realist also has a way of explaining the de re necessity that, prima facie, appears to characterize the relations among redness, orangeness and blueness expressed in (3a) and redness and coloured-ness in (4a). In (3a), the relations are internal relations (see below) among universals in the same quality-order and in (4a), the relation is a determinable/determinate predication relation between a second and first order universal. Historically, the phenomenon of abstract reference has not been an explicit aspect of debates about the One and Many to the degree that predication and exact resemblance have. Still, abstract reference is related to the One and Many in at least this way: redness, blueness, etc., are all entities in their own right, they form a natural class of colours (and are not members of the class, say, of tastes) in that redness et al. have the property of being coloured that grounds their membership...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The problem(s) of universals
• 2 Extreme nominalism and properties
• 3 Moderate nominalism and properties
• 4 Minimalist realism: Wolterstorff's kinds and Armstrong's properties
• 5 Traditional realism: properties are abstract objects
• 6 Traditional realism: issues and objections
• 7 The individuation of particulars
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index