Wednesday, May 17, 2017

What else might properties do?

Suppose that we think of properties as the things that fulfill some functional roles: they are had in common by things that are alike, they correspond to fundamental predicates, etc. Then there is no reason to think that these functional roles are the only things properties do. It is prima facie compatible with fulfilling such functional roles that a property do many other things: it might occupy space, sparkle, eat or think.

Can we produce arguments that the things that fulfill the functional roles that properties are defined by cannot occupy space, sparkle, eat or think? It is difficult to do so. What is it about properties that rules out such activity?

Here's one candidate: necessity. The functional roles properties satisfy require properties to exist necessarily. But all things that occupy space are contingent. And all things that sparkle or eat also occupy space. So no property occupies space, sparkles or eats. (Yes, this has nothing to say about thinking.) Yeah, but first of all it's controversial that all properties are necessary. Many trope theorists think that typical tropes are both contingent and properties. Moreover, it may be that my thisness is a property and yet as contingent as I am. Second, it is unclear that everything that occupies space has to be contingent. One might argue as follows: surely, for any possible entity x, it could be that all space is vacant of x. But it does not follow that everything that occupies space has to be contingent. For we still have the epistemic possibility of a necessary being contingently occupying a region space. Christians, for instance, believe that the Second Person of the Trinity contingently occupied some space in the Holy Land in the first century--admittedly, did not occupy it qua God, but qua human, yet nonetheless did occupy it--and yet the standard view is that God is a necessary being. (Also, God is said to be omnipresent; but we can say that omnipresence isn't "occupation" of space, or that all-space isn't a region of space.)

So the modal argument isn't satisfactory. We still haven't ruled out a property's occupying space, sparkling or eating, much less thinking. In general, I think it's going to be really hard to find an argument to rule that out.

Here's another candidate: abstractness. Properties are abstract, and abstracta can't occupy space, sparkle, eat or think. But the difficulty is giving an account of abstracta that lets us be confident both that properties are abstract and that abstract things can't engage in such activities. That's hard. We could, for instance, define abstract things as those that do not stand in spatiotemporal relations. That would rule out occupying space, sparkling or eating--but the question whether all properties are abstracta would now be as difficult as the question whether a property can occupy space. Likewise, we could define abstract things as those that do not stand in causal relations, which would rule out sparkling, eating and thinking, but of course anybody who is open to the possibility that properties can do these activities will be open to properties standing in causal relations. Or we could define abstractness by ostension: abstract things are things like properties, propositions, numbers, etc. Now it's clear that properties are abstracta, but we are no further ahead on the occupying space, sparkling, eating or thinking front--unless perhaps we can make some kind of an inductive argument that the other kinds of abstracta can't do these things, so neither can properties. But whether propositions or numbers can do these things is, I think, just as problematic a question as whether properties can.

All in all, here's what I think: If we think of the Xs (properties, propositions, numbers, etc.) as things that fulfill some functional roles, it's going to be super-hard to rule out the possibility that some or all Xs do things other than fulfilling these functional roles.

For more related discussion, see this old contest.

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