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Two Problems for Resemblance Nominalism

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Two Problems for Resemblance Nominalism Two Problems for Resemblance Nominalism Andrea C. Bottani, Università di Bergamo [email protected] I. Nominalisms Just as ‘being’ according to Aristotle, ‘nominalism’ can be said in many ways, being currently used to refer to a number of non equivalent theses, each denying the existence of entities of a certain sort. In a Quinean largely shared sense, nominalism is the thesis that abstract entities do not exist. In other senses, some of which also are broadly shared, nominalism is the thesis that universals do not exist; the thesis that neither universals nor tropes exist; the thesis that properties do not exist. These theses seem to be independent, at least to some degree: some ontologies incorporate all of them, some none, some just one and some more than one but not all. This makes the taxonomy of nominalisms very complex. Armstrong 1978 distinguishes six varieties of nominalism according to which neither universals nor tropes exist, called respectively ‘ostrich nominalism’, ‘predicate nominalism’, ‘concept nominalism’, ‘mereological nominalism’, ‘class nominalism’ and ‘resemblance nominalism’, which Armstrong criticizes but considers superior to any other version. According to resemblance nominalism, properties depend on primitive resemblance relations among particulars, while there are neither universals nor tropes. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002 contains a systematic formulation and defence of a version of resemblance nominalism according to which properties exist, conceived of as maximal classes of exactly resembling particulars. An exact resemblance is one that two particulars can bear to each other just in case there is some ‘lowest determinate’ property - for example, being of an absolutely precise nuance of red – that both have just in virtue of precisely resembling certain particulars (so that chromatic resemblance can only be chromatic indiscernibility). This is not the only possible variety of resemblance nominalism. Another variety of resemblance nominalism, that is sketched in Price 1953, treats properties as maximal classes of particulars closely resembling a small number of paradigms, where close resemblance in colour does not require chromatic indiscernibility (and so, there need to be no ‘lowest determinate’ property that resembling particulars share). In this paper, I shall not consider the latter variety of resemblance nominalism, which Rodriguez-Pereyra convincingly criticizes1, and which even Price does not seem to have either accepted or rejected. Instead, I shall raise a couple of objections against 1 See Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002, pp 124-141 1 Rodriguez-Pereyra’s version of resemblance nominalism. First, I shall argue that Rodriguez-Pereyra’s solution to the so-called “imperfect community difficulty”2 is untenable. Second, I shall argue that Rodriguez-Pereyra’s idea that sparse properties are bound to be lowest determinates, while determinable properties of any degree are to be treated as (infinite) disjunctions of determinates, is liable to undermine the whole approach. II. Resemblance, classes and imperfect communities In Rodriguez-Pereyra’s version, resemblance nominalism “says, roughly, that for a particular to have a property F is for it to resemble all the F-particulars”3. Since an F- particular is just something that has the property F, this idea of what it is for a particular to have the property F may sound plainly circular: having F merely amounts to resembling all the things that have F, which can hardly be seen as an explanation of what it is to have F. The circularity, however, vanishes if one formulates the general idea in some less rough way. One way is as follows. Whenever there are n things such that each of them resembles all of them and nothing else does, there must be exactly one sparse, lowest determinate, non-disjunctive property F that all and only those things share. And their sharing F is nothing over and above their resembling each other, so that having F simply amounts to resembling all those things. If one is not sceptical about classes, one can easily identify F with the class of those things resemblance to which amounts to having F (that is, with the class of things that have F). This explains why there are a number of difficulties that resemblance nominalism shares with class nominalism. One has to do with coextensive properties.4 If F and G are had exactly by the same things, having F and having G consist in resembling the same things, which entails that F and G cannot be different. But there seems to be no reason to treat properties like having a heart and having kidneys as the same property, despite the fact that all the organisms with a heart also have kidneys and vice versa. The coextension difficulty can be brought under control by embracing modal realism5. If what makes a particular have a property F is that it resembles all possible F-particulars, then F and G can be treated as different even in case they are coextensive in the actual world. And the usual rejoinder according to which this does not allow one to treat necessarily coextensive properties as different can be blocked 2 Goodman 1966, pp. 162-64 3 Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002, p. 25 4Leaving aside coextensive properties, both class nominalism and resemblance nominalism have been thought to be committed to an infinite regress and to be unable to give a correct account of relations (see Armstrong 1978, 1989). 5 Rodriguez-Pereyra, 2002, p. 99 2 by claiming that every apparent example of necessarily coextensive properties “is in fact just a case of semantically different predicates applying in virtue of one and the same property or relation”6. The coextension difficulty challenges the idea that whenever n particulars are such that each of them resembles all of them and nothing else does, there is at most one (sparse, lowest determinate) property that they share. What is known as “the imperfect community difficulty” challenges the idea that, whenever there are n such particulars, there is at least one property that they share. The difficulty was first named and described by Nelson Goodman in The Structure of Appearance. For the sake of simplicity, suppose that there are three things a, b and c such that a is red and hot but not soft, b is red and soft but not hot and c is soft and hot but not red. Since a and b share the property of being red, a and c share the property of being hot and b and c share the property of being soft, surely a, b and c are such that each of them resembles all of them. Now, suppose that nothing else resembles both a, b and c (only a, b and c do). In such a case, either there is a sparse, lowest determinate property that a, b and c share or resemblance nominalism is false. But the only property that a, b and c seem to share is the disjunctive property of being either red, hot or soft – which is abundant, non-sparse. Therefore, resemblance nominalism is false: sometimes n things are such that each of them resembles all of them and nothing else does, but there is no sparse, lowest determinate property that all and only those things share. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002 attempts to avoid the difficulty by making the relation between resemblance and having a property more complicated. According to this refined version of resemblance nominalism, in order for some things to be the only things that share a sparse, lowest determinate property it is no longer sufficient that each of them resembles all of them and nothing else does, it is also required that each couple of them resembles all couples of them and that each couple of couples of them resembles all couples of couples of them, and so on. According to Rodriguez-Pereyra, there is a sense in which, even if a, b and c are such that each of them resembles all of them, their couples do not. This sense, however, is not immediately transparent. For there is an obvious sense in which all the couples of a, b and c are such that each of them does resemble all of them. First, they all are couples. Second, they are resembling couples, given that the elements of each of them resemble the elements of all of them. Third, no other couple can be such that its elements resembles the elements of all of them, since the elements of all of them are just a, b and c, and by hypothesis nothing else except a, b and c resembles all of a, b and c. So, to conclude with, the couples of a, b and c are such that each of them resembles all of them and 6 Rodriguez-Pereyra, 2002, p.100 3 nothing else does. But, nonetheless, there seems to be no property that a, b and c share. What Rodriguez-Pereyra has in mind is that, in order for a, b and c to share any property, all the couples of a, b and c (and their couples and the couples of their couples and so on) must not merely resemble but instead resemble in a specific way. And two couples resemble in this specific way if and only if the elements of one couple resemble each other in the same way as the elements of the other couple resemble each other. This is not the case, for example, with the couples <a, b> and <b, c>, since the elements of the first couple resemble each other inasmuch as they are both red, while the elements of the second couple resemble each other inasmuch as they are both soft. Less roughly, the account runs as follows. If a particular is red, say that it is red0.
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