| 10956 | If we only saw bronze circles, would bronze be part of the concept of a circle? [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Suppose we only ever saw bronze circles - would that make the bronze a formal part of the circle? | |
| From: Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1036b01) | |
| A reaction: This is Aristotle spotting the problem of coextensionality (the renate/cordate problem) 2300 years ago. Don't underestimate those Greeks. |
| 10317 | It is unclear whether Frege included qualities among his abstract objects [Frege, by Hale] |
| Full Idea: Expositors of Frege's views have disagreed over whether abstract qualities are to be reckoned among his objects. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Bob Hale - Abstract Objects Ch.2.II | |
| A reaction: [he cites Dummett 1973:70-80, and Wright 1983:25-8] There seems to be a danger here of a collision between Fregean verbal approaches to ontological commitment and the traditional views about universals. No wonder they can't decide. |
| 4028 | Frege allows either too few properties (as extensions) or too many (as predicates) [Mellor/Oliver on Frege] |
| Full Idea: Frege's theory of properties (which he calls 'concepts') yields too few properties, by identifying coextensive properties, and also too many, by letting every predicate express a property. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (Function and Concept [1891]) by DH Mellor / A Oliver - Introduction to 'Properties' §2 | |
| A reaction: Seems right; one extension may have two properties (have heart/kidneys), two predicates might express the same property. 'Cutting nature at the joints' covers properties as well as objects. |
| 8534 | Quine says the predicate of a true statement has no ontological implications [Quine, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Quine's doctrine is that the predicate of a true statement carries no ontological implications. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (works [1961]) by David M. Armstrong - Properties §1 | |
| A reaction: Quine is ontologically committed to the subject of the statement (an object). The predicate seems to be an inseparable part of that object. Quine is, of course, a holist, so ontological commitment isn't judged in single statements. |
| 15804 | If some dogs are brown, that entails the properties of 'being brown' and 'being canine' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: The state of affairs which is some dogs being brown may be said to entail (make it necessarily so) the property of 'being brown', as well as the properties of 'being canine' and 'being both brown and canine'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: And the property of 'being such that it is both brown and canine and brown or canine'. Etc. This is dangerous nonsense. Making all truths entail the existence of some property means we can no longer get to grips with real properties. |
| 8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Attributes should not be thought of as identifiable objects. It is better to follow Frege and compare them to mathematical functions. 'Square of' and 'double of' x are distinct functions, even though they are not distinguishable in thought when x is 2. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
| A reaction: Attributes are features of the world, of which animals are well aware, and the mathematical model is dubious when dealing with physical properties. The route to arriving at 2 is not the same concept as 2. There are many roads to Rome. |
| 4034 | Whether we apply 'cold' or 'hot' to an object is quite separate from its change of temperature [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Evading properties by means of predicates is implausible when things change. If a cold thing becomes hot, first 'cold' applies, and then 'hot', but what have predicates to do with the temperature of an object? | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Properties [1992], §1) | |
| A reaction: A clear illustration of why properties are part of nature, not just part of language. But some applications of predicates are more arbitrary than this (ugly, cool) |
| 8535 | To the claim that every predicate has a property, start by eliminating failure of application of predicate [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Upholders of properties have been inclined to postulate a distinct property corresponding to each distinct predicate. We could start by eliminating all those properties where the predicate fails to apply, is not true, of anything. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Properties [1992], §1) | |
| A reaction: This would leave billions of conjunctional, disjunctional and gerrymandered properties where the predicate applies very well. We are all 'on the same planet as New York'. Am I allowed to say that I 'wish' that a was F? He aims for 'sparse' properties. |
| 13582 | 'Being a methane molecule' is not a property - it is just a predicate [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: In my view 'being a methane molecule' is not a property name, but a predicate that is constructed out of a natural kind name, and so pretends to name a property. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Scientific Essentialism [2001], 2.03) | |
| A reaction: I can't tell you how strongly I agree with this. How long have you got? This is so incredibly right that... You get the idea. He observes that such properties cannot be instantiated 'in' anything. |
| 15756 | Some truths are not because of a thing's properties, but because of the properties of related things [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes a predicate is true of a thing, not because (or only because) of any properties it has, but because something else, perhaps something related to it in certain ways, has certain properties. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §02) | |
| A reaction: I'm on mission to prize predicates and properties apart, and the strategy is to focus on what is true of something, given that this may not ascribe a property to the thing. |
| 15761 | We should abandon the idea that properties are the meanings of predicate expressions [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: I think we should abandon the idea that properties are the meanings of predicate expressions. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §04) | |
| A reaction: Right. I have Shoemaker on my side, and he is a distinguished and senior member of the philosophical community. I don't just prefer not to use 'predicate' and 'property' indistinguishably - philosophers should really really give it up! |
| 8564 | There is obviously a possible predicate for every property [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: To every property there obviously corresponds a possible predicate applying to all and only those particulars with that property. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as at all obvious. If nature dictates the properties, there may be vastly more than any human language could cope with. It is daft to say that a property can only exist if humanity can come up with a predicate for it. |
| 16471 | I accept a hierarchy of properties of properties of properties [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: I myself am prepared to accept higher-order properties and relations. There is the property of being Socrates, …and the property of being the property of being Socrates, ..and so on. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Mere Possibilities [2012], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Elsewhere I have quoted such a hierarchy of vacuous properties as an absurdity that arises if all predicates are treated as properties. Logicians can live with such stuff, given their set hierarchy and so on, but in science and life this is a nonsense. |
| 15563 | Properties are very abundant (unlike universals), and are used for semantics and higher-order variables [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Properties are abundant, numbering at least beth-3 for properties of individuals alone; they are suited to serve as semantic values of arbitrarily complex predicates and gerunds, and higher-order variables. (If there are universals, they are sparse). | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II n2) | |
| A reaction: To me this is an outrageous hijacking of the notion of property which is needed for explaining the natural world. He seems to be talking about predicates. He wants to leave me with his silly universals - well I don't want them, thank you. |
| 15739 | There is the property of belonging to a set, so abundant properties are as numerous as the sets [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: The abundant properties far outrun the predicates of any language we could possibly possess. ...Properties are as abundant as the sets, because for any set whatever, there is the property of belonging to that set. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: The idea of calling such things 'properties' strikes me as preposterous, but it is interesting that we confront truths which outrun our predicates. We can't have all of these predicates together, but there is no impediment to any one of them. |
| 18433 | There are far more properties than any brain could ever encodify [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: There are so many properties that those specifiable in English, or in the brain's language of synaptic interconnections and neural spikes, could only be an infinitesimal minority. | |
| From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Un and Prop') | |
| A reaction: Thus there are innumerable properties that must lack predicates. But there are also innumerable predicates that correspond to no real properties. I conclude that properties and predicates have very little in common. Job done. |
| 8604 | We need properties as semantic values for linguistic expressions [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We need properties, sometimes natural and sometimes not, to provide an adequate supply of semantic values for linguistic expressions. | |
| From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Un and Prop') | |
| A reaction: A characteristically twentieth century approach, which I find puzzling. We don't need a Loch Ness Monster in order to use the term 'Loch Ness Monster'. Lewis appears to have been a pupil of Quine... He was not, though, a Predicate Nominalist. |
| 7014 | A particle and a coin heads-or-tails pick out to perfectly well-defined predicates and properties [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: 'Is a particle and my coin is heads' and 'is a particle and my coin is tails' are perfectly well defined predicates and they pick out perfectly well defined (relational) properties of physical particles. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: (Somewhat paraphrased). This is a very nice offering for the case that all predicates are properties, and hence that 'properties' is an entirely conventional category. It strikes me as self-evident that Fodor is not picking out 'natural' properties. |
| 18443 | A successful predicate guarantees the existence of a property - the way of being it expresses [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: The good standing of a predicate is already trivially sufficient to ensure the existence of an associated property, a (perhaps complex) way of being which the predicate serves to express. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: 'Way of being' is interesting. Is 'being near Trafalgar Sq' a way of being? I take properties to be 'features', which seems to give a clearer way of demarcating them. They say they are talking about 'abundant' (rather than 'sparse') properties. |
| 10714 | The expressions with properties as their meanings are predicates and abstract singular terms [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The types of expressions which have properties as their meanings may vary, the chief candidates being predicates, such as '...is wise', and abstract singular terms, such as 'wisdom'. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be important, because there is too much emphasis on predicates. If this idea is correct, we need some account of what 'abstract' means, which is notoriously tricky. |
| 10715 | There are five main semantic theories for properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Properties in semantic theory: functions from worlds to extensions ('Californian'), reference, as opposed to sense, of predicates (Frege), reference to universals (Russell), reference to situations (Barwise/Perry), and composition from context (Lewis). | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02 n12) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; 'Californian' refers to Carnap and Montague; the Lewis view is p,67 of Oliver]. Frege misses out singular terms, or tries to paraphrase them away. Barwise and Perry sound promising to me. Situations involve powers. |
| 7015 | A predicate applies truly if it picks out a real property of objects [Heil] |
| Full Idea: When a predicate applies truly to an object, it does so in virtue of designating a property possessed by that object and by every object to which the predicate truly applies (or would apply). | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: I am sympathetic to Heil's aim of shifting our attention from arbitrary predicates to natural properties, but it won't avoid Fodor's problem (Idea 7014) that all kinds of whimsical predicates will apply 'truly', but fail to pick out anything significant. |
| 4587 | From the property predicates P and Q, we can get 'P or Q', but it doesn't have to designate another property [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If P and Q are predicates denoting properties, we can construct a disjunctive predicate ('P or Q'). But it is not clear that this gives us any right whatever to suppose that 'P or Q' designates a property. | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Pref) | |
| A reaction: An important idea, needed to disentangle our ontology from our language, and realise that they are separate. Properties are natural; predicates are conventional. |
| 18533 | In Fa, F may not be a property of a, but a determinable, satisfied by some determinate [Heil] |
| Full Idea: It may be that F applies truly to a because F is a determinable predicate satisfied by a's possession of a property answering to a determinate of that determinable predicate. | |
| From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.01) | |
| A reaction: Heil aims to break the commitment of predicates to the existence of properties. The point is that there is no property 'coloured' to correspond to 'a is coloured'. Red might be the determinate that does the job. Nice. |
| 18540 | Predicates only match properties at the level of fundamentals [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Only when you get to fundamental physics, do predicates begin to line up with properties. | |
| From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice thought. I assume the actual properties of daily reality only connect to our predicates in very sloppy ways. I suppose our fundamental predicates have to converge on the actual properties, because the fog clears. Sort of. |
| 13638 | Properties are often seen as intensional; equiangular and equilateral are different, despite identity of objects [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Properties are often taken to be intensional; equiangular and equilateral are thought to be different properties of triangles, even though any triangle is equilateral if and only if it is equiangular. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Foundations without Foundationalism [1991], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Many logicians seem to want to treat properties as sets of objects (red being just the set of red things), but this looks like a desperate desire to say everything in first-order logic, where only objects are available to quantify over. |
| 8273 | Is 'the Thames is broad in London' relational, or adverbial, or segmental? [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: "The Thames is broad in London" might be taken as 'The Thames is broad-in-London', or as 'The Thames is-in-London broad', or as 'The Thames-in-London is broad'. I would urge the superiority of the second one, as an analysis of the normal meaning. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 5.8) | |
| A reaction: He uses the example to attack the perdurance view of objects (i.e. the third analysis). I think I agree with Lowe, but I'm not sure, and I just love the example. Read the second as 'The Thames is (in London) broad'? 'Is' of existence, or predication? |
| 14995 | Predicates can be 'sparse' if there is a universal, or if there is a natural property or relation [Sider] |
| Full Idea: For Armstrong a predicate is sparse when there exists a corresponding universal; for Lewis, a predicate is sparse when there exists a corresponding natural property or relation. | |
| From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 06) | |
| A reaction: I like 'sparse' properties, but have no sympathy with Armstrong, and am cautious about Lewis. I like Shoemaker's account, which makes properties even sparser. 'Abundant' so-called properties are my pet hate. They are 'predicates'! |
| 9503 | To name an abundant property is either a Fregean concept, or a simple predicate [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It isn't clear what it is to name an abundant property. One might reify them, as akin to Fregean concepts, or it might be equivalent to a simple predication. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.1.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Fregean concepts' would make them functions that purely link things (hence relational?). One suspects that people who actually treat abundant properties as part of their ontology (Lewis) are confusing natural properties with predicates. |
| 18432 | Quineans say that predication is primitive and inexplicable [Edwards] |
| Full Idea: The Quinean claims that the application of a predicate cannot, in principle, be explained - it is a 'primitive' fact. | |
| From: Douglas Edwards (Properties [2014], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: I am not clear what 'principle' could endorse this claim. There just seems to be a possible failure of all the usual attempts at explaining predication. |