Empiricism and the Problem of Metaphysics by Studtmann Paul;

Author:Studtmann, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Ontology: Universals, Particulars, and Essence

Universals

In addition to writing seminal tracts on God and substance, Aristotle also wrote seminal tracts in what have come to be known as ontological debates. Philosophers who engage in ontological debates try to articulate the most basic kinds of entities and their relations to each other that are needed in order to account for a set of data that usually includes purported facts about abstract reference, predication, and qualitative and numerical identity. Perhaps the most basic and well known of these debates concerns the existence of universals.

According to realists in the universals debate, nominalized predicates refer to sui generis entities that account for the qualitative identity of numerically distinct particulars. Hence, a realist not only thinks that “whiteness” refers to a universal (i.e., some entity distinct from all the particulars in the world), but also that the whiteness of the left half of a piece of paper is numerically identical to the whiteness of the right half of that piece of paper. According to a realist, then, the qualitative identity of the two halves of the paper is to be explained in terms of the numerical identity of the whiteness that both halves of the paper instantiate.

By itself, the realist position in the universals debate does not obviously implicate modality. But the difference between two of the classic realist positions clearly does. Traditionally, realists divide into two camps depending on whether they think that universals depend for their existence on the particulars that instantiate them. According to ante rem realism, which is a doctrine typically traced to Plato, universals can exist uninstantiated, while according to in rebus realism, which is typically traced to Aristotle, universals cannot exist uninstantiated. The distinction between ante rem and in rebus realism thus contains a modal concept. Moreover, it is not difficult to show that the modality in question needs to be stronger than a logical notion, though the issue is complicated a bit in virtue of the need to appeal to second-order languages in order to distinguish between the views.

Ante rem realists and in rebus realists differ over their attitudes about sentences of the following sort: “Whiteness exists and no objects are white.”

Whereas ante rem realists accept the possible truth of such a sentence, in rebus realists do not. Arguably, however, first-order languages lack the expressive power to capture the content of the sentence. In first-order languages, predicates never appear in the subject position of a sentence, and so an English sentence containing a nominalized predicate that stands in the subject position does not have any obvious translation into a first-order language. Second-order languages, however, do allow predicates to stand in the subject position of a sentence; and so a second-order translation is straightforward. Let “W” stand for the predicate “is white.” Then the sentence admits of the following translation:

(14) (F)(F = W & (x)(~Fx))

Ante Rem realists think that (14) is possibly true, while in rebus realists deny such a possibility. If the modality at issue here is logical, then

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