Page 66 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
out by our ordinary language predicates) sort them into types. Particulars of the same type, say being 1 kilogram in mass, literally have something in common, the universal 1 kilogram in mass, which grounds the resemblance.
3. A Nominalist Response
David Lewis (1983) rejects Armstrong's universals. Lewis suggests that properties are classes of actual and possible particulars. Predication is analyzed by the primitive relation of class-membership—to have a property is just to be a member of a class. Since every class of particulars is a property, properties are even more abundant than predicates. Such indiscriminate properties cannot ground the objective resemblances of particulars. But Lewis suggests classes can be ordered on a scale of naturalness. The perfectly natu- ral classes are those which contain particulars of the same type. Unlike Armstrong, Lewis does not attempt to analyze the facts of resemblance but rather takes these facts as primitive.
So Armstrong and Lewis both do justice to the facts of resemblance by having a sparse conception of properties. But because Armstrong does not tie universals to language, he cannot easily employ uni- versals in giving that language a semantics. Lewis, on the other hand, also has an abundant conception of properties that can supply ready-made semantic values for predicates—to each predicate there cor- responds the class of actual and possible particulars that satisfy the predicate. Indeed, such classes can function as the semantic values for other linguistic categories as well. For example, red is a color employs 'red' as an abstract singular term. It is extremely difficult to paraphrase this sentence so that the appar- ent reference to a property disappears. But it is also
implausible to suppose that 'red' stands for a universal (on Armstrong's sparse theory). So Lewis suggests that 'red' stands for the class of red particulars. Such classes also prove to be the best candidates for the values of the variables of second-order quantifiers as insomezoologicalspeciesare cross-fertile.
4. Future Work
There can be no doubt that both sparse and abundant conceptions of properties and relations are required. A semantics for natural language will require an abun- dant conception, whereas work in metaphysics sug- gests that the sparse conception can do much more besides accounting for sameness of type among par- ticulars. The compulsory and widely contested ques- tion is how one should characterize these two conceptions and their relationship to one another. It should be mentioned that a theory of tropes, or abstract particulars, is receiving increasing attention as a viable alternative to both Armstrong's realism and Lewis'sclass-nominalism.
See also: Nominalism;Ontology; Realism. Bibliography
Armstrong D M 1978 Universals and Scientific Realism, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Armstrong D M 1989 Universals: An Opinionated Intro- duction. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Campbell K 1990 Abstract Particulars.Blackwell, Oxford Lewis D K 1983 New work for a theory of universals. Aus-
tralasian Journal of Philosophy 61: 343-77
Loux M J 1976 The existence of universals. In: Loux M J
(ed.) UniversalsandParticulars:ReadingsinOntology,rev.
edn. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN Mellor D H Oliver A D (eds.) 1997 Properties.Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford
Oliver A D 1996 The metaphysics of properties. Mind 105:
1-8.
Verificationism is the latter-day incarnation of classi- cal empiricism. In keeping with the classical empiricist tradition formulated by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, verificationists give a preeminent place to experience in the acquisition of knowledge. During the nineteenth century, while idealism was prevalent in Germany and Britain,ViennabecameacenterforEuropeanempiri- cism. This Viennese tradition continued into the twen- tieth century and took a very clear and influential form in the 1920s with the formation of the Vienna
Circle and the development of the set of philosophical ideas that became known as 'logical positivism.' Influenced by the anti-metaphysical positions of the scientifically inclined Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare, the Vienna Circle opposed the apparently extravagant metaphysical claims of German and British idealism which seemed to be based on an allegedly supra- scientific access to truth. Thinkers in the Vienna Circle rejected both idealist metaphysics and the possi- bility of any nonscientific method for acquiring
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Verificationism S. Shalkowski