Philosophers have long pondered the Problem of Universals. Socrates and Plato hypothesized that the Universals exist independent of the real world in a universe of their own. The Doctrine of the Forms was criticized by Aristotle, who stated that the Universals do not exist apart from things — a theory known as Hylomorphism. This paper postulates that Measurement in Quantum Mechanics is the proc...

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...

Human societies are remarkably diverse but this diversity is not limitless. Human cultural and linguistic variation is patterned and the spectrum of variation is not as wide as the “ethnographic hyperspace” we could think of. There are phenomena regularly found in all human cultures. Among the better known examples out of hundreds of universals are ethnocentrism, incest avoidance and social rec...

Universals have traditionally thought to obey the identity of indiscernibles, that is, it has been there can be no perfectly similar universals. But at least in conception universals as immanent, is nothing rules out being indiscernible In this paper, I shall argue useful work do, and so might reason postulate particular, postulating allow a theory identify particulars with bundles universals, ...

The discovery of general patterns and their subsequent explanation is a familiar method in linguistics and other cross-cultural research. This paper addresses the computerized enumeration of significant cultural and linguistic patterns, specifically implicational universals. We dispute published suggestions that the mechanical generation of universals is inadvisable, by arguing that such claims...

is thesis argues for realism about universals — the view that, in addition to particular things, there exist universals instantiated by those particular things. e rst half presents a positive case for realism. Here it is claimed that universals are needed in our ontology to serve as the respects in which things are the same, and the features or characteristics that things have in common. is ar...

Music has been called "the universal language of mankind." Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-samp...