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Full Idea
Quine has attempted to bypass the problem of universals by arguing for the ontological innocence of predicates, since it is the application conditions of predicates which furnish the Realists with much of their case.
Clarification
An 'ontological commitment' says that something (like universals) must exist
Gist of Idea
Quine has argued that predicates do not have any ontological commitment
Source
report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by David M. Armstrong - Universals p.503
Book Ref
'A Companion to Metaphysics', ed/tr. Kim,Jaegwon/Sosa,Ernest [Blackwell 1995], p.503
A Reaction
Presumably this would be a claim that predicates appear to commit us to properties, but that properties are not natural features, and can be reduced to something else. Tricky..
| 15384 | Only words can be 'predicated of many'; the universality is just in its mode of signifying [Abelard, by Panaccio] |
| 6440 | Universals can't just be words, because words themselves are universals [Russell] |
| 7952 | If we apply the same word to different things, it is only because we are willing to do so [Goodman, by Macdonald,C] |
| 4443 | Quine has argued that predicates do not have any ontological commitment [Quine, by Armstrong] |
| 10789 | Nominalists say predication is relations between individuals, or deny that it refers [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 8530 | Change of temperature in objects is quite independent of the predicates 'hot' and 'cold' [Armstrong] |
| 8536 | We want to know what constituents of objects are grounds for the application of predicates [Armstrong] |
| 4031 | It doesn't follow that because there is a predicate there must therefore exist a property [Armstrong] |
| 4431 | 'Predicate Nominalism' says that a 'universal' property is just a predicate applied to lots of things [Armstrong] |
| 8565 | If properties were just the meanings of predicates, they couldn't give predicates their meaning [Mellor] |
| 8967 | Not all predicates can be properties - 'is non-self-exemplifying', for example [Lowe] |
| 4205 | 'Is non-self-exemplifying' is a predicate which cannot denote a property (as it would be a contradiction) [Lowe] |
| 4457 | There can be predicates with no property, and there are properties with no predicate [Moreland] |