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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that 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

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 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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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 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 against 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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