Friederike Moltmann Two Kinds of Universals and Two Kinds of Collections

Natural language, as is well known, seems to involve a rather rich ontology. It easily allows for reference to universals (with nominalizations such as honesty) und thus seems to involve a realist ontology, with properties acting as objects. It also allows reference to collections of any sort (with plurals and conjunctive NPs) und thus seems to involve unrestricted composition. In this paper, I will argue that in the context of natural language semantics, two fundamental distinctions need to be made among two kinds of universals and two kinds of collections and moreover that those two distinctions are based on the same underlying parameter. Given those distinctions, only one of the universals and one of the collections truly classify as objects, whereas the other kind has a much secondary status. One kind of universal and one kind of collection, roughly speaking, are treated like ordinary individuals, allowing predicates to be predicated of them in just the familiar way. The other kind of universal and the other kind of collection allow predicates to be predicated only on the basis of properties fulfilled by the next lower-level entities, the instances in the case of universals and the individual members in the case of collections. Whereas nominalizations such as honesty refer to universals of the first sort, terms such as the property of honesty refer to universals of the second sort. Plurals like the children, moreover, refer to collections in the first sense, and collective NPs like the group of children refer to collections in the second sense. The distinction between the two ways of assigning properties to entities might even give a reconstruction of the old philosophical distinction between Platonic universals and Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them, can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly abstract objects: their existence is independent of the particulars that instantiate them, and they are not located in space and time at all. In terms of the two ways of assigning properties to entities, the distinction between those two conceptions of universals can be looked at as follows: