Four Disputes About Properties

My intention in this paper is to spell out four great issues that divide philosophers who think about the metaphysics of properties. The issues are largely independent of each other. The way the cats jump on one does not seem greatly to prejudge the way they will jump on the other issues. I shall indicate my preferences, but I shall be as much concerned to survey the scene as to push my particular wheelbarrow. My primary concern will be with properties in the narrow sense, that is, properties as opposed to relations. But what I say should apply to relations as well, at least external ones. Again, my concern will be with what David Lewis called the sparse theory of properties, with total science as the most important arbiter of just what sparse properties we want to recognize. 1. Universals vs. Tropes. The first issue is one that has been exceedingly well canvassed in recent decades. Indeed, a certain fatigue and boredom may have set in. This is the question whether properties should be conceived of (" assayed " as Gustav Bergmann's school of philosophers in Iowa used to put it) as universals or particulars, as universals or, as many now argue, as tropes. It is well known since the work of Donald Williams, the Harvard philosopher (Donald C. Williams, 1966) that tropes may be collected into equivalence classes closed under the relation of exact similarity, with similarity and its degrees taken as a metaphysical primitive. Such equivalence classes turn out to be in many ways a good substitute for universals, and the dispute has taken on a somewhat ritualistic air where neither party seems to gain any decisive advantage. It is to be noted that in this dispute it is possible to have the sort of compromise where it is declared that both sides are right. You can accept both universals and tropes, and some philosophers have done so. An object can be said both to instantiate the universal being one kilo in mass, yet also have the trope of being one kilo in mass. For myself, I think that this compromise offends against Occam's Razor. Redundant truthmakers are provided for true predications of properties.