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    Sentences like 'Redness is a property' and 'The north-of ... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Sentences like 'Redness is a property' and 'The north-of relation holds between San Francisco and Los Angeles' do not entail the existence of properties or relations

    Modality & PossibilityPhilosophy of Language
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Singular terms in surface grammar do not guarantee ontological commitment; only terms indispensable to best theory do (Quine, 'On What There Is').
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    • 2.Predicate nominalism allows 'Redness is a property' to be paraphrased as 'All red things resemble each other', eliminating abstract reference (Price 1953).
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    • 3.A sentence's truth conditions can be satisfied by facts about concrete particulars without invoking abstract entities as values of bound variables.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Grover, Camp, and Belnap's prosentential theory treats apparent property-referring expressions as proforms inheriting content from prior discourse, not as genuine names.
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    • 2.If 'Redness is a property' functions prosententially rather than referentially, its truth does not require 'redness' to denote an abstract object.
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    • 3.Stephen Schiffer's 'pleonastic' account holds that property-talk is generated by meaning-preserving transformations that introduce no new ontological commitments.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Sentences like 'Redness is a property' are equivalent in meaning to sentences like 'Mars is red'
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    • 2.Sentences like 'Mars is red' do not entail the existence of properties or relations
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageModality & Possibility

    Related

    A sentence's truth conditions can be satisfied by facts about concrete particula...Grover, Camp, and Belnap's prosentential theory treats apparent property-referri...If 'Redness is a property' functions prosententially rather than referentially, ...Predicate nominalism allows 'Redness is a property' to be paraphrased as 'All re...
    +4 moreShow less
    Sentences like 'Mars is red' do not entail the existence of properties or relati...Sentences like 'Redness is a property' are equivalent in meaning to sentences li...Singular terms in surface grammar do not guarantee ontological commitment; only ...Stephen Schiffer's 'pleonastic' account holds that property-talk is generated by...

    Similar

    Sentences like 'Redness is a property' and 'The north-of relation hold...87%Sentences like 'Mars is red' do not entail the existence of properties...87%Most Fregeans deny that properties are identical to concepts, so the a...82%Not all properties and relations entail existence, so non-existent obj...82%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: platonism
    View source passageHide passage
    In order to make out a version of the singular term argument here, platonists would need to begin by arguing that these sentences commit us to the existence of the property of redness and the north-of relation, respectively, because (a) they have singular terms that denote those things, and (b) they are true. In order to motivate claim (a), platonists would have to refute the paraphrase-nominalist claim that sentences like (P1) and (R1) are equivalent to sentences like ‘Mars is red’ and ‘San Fra
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit