A Note on Bearer-Uniqueness and Particularised Qualities

Many friends of the category of particularised qualities subscribe to the view that particularised qualities have a unique bearer in which they inhere; no such quality then can inhere in two different entities. But it seems that this idea is flawed, for there are apparent counterexamples. An apple’s redness is identical with the redness of its skin, though the apple is distinct from its skin. So it seems that a principle of beareruniqueness has to be modified, maybe by excluding certain unwanted cases. However, I argue that the need of a modification is not a direct consequence of the supposed counterexamples. Their dangerous potential for the principle arises if one takes the genitive in expressions of the form “a’s F-ness” to signify the relation of inherence. I propose an alternative view: The genitive signifies a relation which is indeed closely related to inherence, but which is, contrary to inherence itself, partitive. That is, it may hold between a particularised quality and another entity because it holds between the quality and a part of the entity. If one regards the ontologically interesting relation of inherence as non-partitive, one can still adhere to an unrestricted principle of bearer-uniqueness. A Note on Bearer-Uniqueness