Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Abstract

If I say that Alice is everything Oscar hopes to be (healthy, wealthy, wise etc.), I seem to be quantifying over properties. That suggestion faces an immediate difficulty, however: though Alice may be wise, she surely is not the property of being wise. This problem can be framed in terms of a substitution failure: if a predicate like 'happy' denoted a property, we would expect pairs like 'Oscar is happy' and 'Oscar is the property of being happy' to be equivalent, which they clearly are not. I argue that a Fregean response that draws a distinction between objects and concepts faces serious difficulties, and that a syntactic solution to the substitution problem likewise fails. I propose to account for the substitution failure by instead distinguishing different ways that expressions can stand for properties: whereas the 'the property of being happy' refers to a property, 'happy' expresses or ascribes that property. I go on to compare this view to proposals made by Wright (1998) andLiebesman (2014), and end by drawing out a consequence my proposal has for a debate about the ontological commitments of predicatively quantified sentences.One reaction to this problem would be to jump ship to the nominalist camp. Predicates, one might insist, let us describe things as being this way or that, but not by way of denoting properties, or anything else for that matter. An immediate hurdle confronting this view is that it threatens to rob us of the resources needed to make sense of the possibility of quantifying into predicate position. For if predicates do not denote anything, there looks to be nothing for predicative quantifiers to quantify over, and so no obvious way to understand the semantics of such quantifiers. 2 Moving forward, I will set the nominalist view aside. The question I want to consider is how to deal with substitution failures like the above while holding on to the idea that there are things that predicates denote, and that predicative quantifiers can accordingly be construed as quantifying over. I will consider three competing answers to that question, and argue that we should opt for the third.The first option is to adopt a Fregean approach, and to hold that the postcopular expressions in (1a) and (1b) must denote different things. Properties, the Fregean will say, are objects of a certain sort, in the sense that they are denoted by certain nominal expressions and quantified over in certain nominally quantified sentences. Predicates like 'happy', he will insist, denote things of a fundamentally different kind -what Frege termed concepts. The Fregean would thus have us abandon the property-based view: the things denoted by predicates and quantified over by predicative quantifiers are not properties, but things of this fundamentally different kind.A second option is to look for a syntactic solution. Truth conditions, we should remind ourselves, are determined by both syntax and semantics. We might therefore seek a syntactic explanation of the change in truth conditions that we observe in our substitution p...

Ramsification and the ramifications of Prior's puzzle

“…14 This example is due to Friederike Moltmann [2003,2004]. Similar examples of failures of substitution in predicative positions are discussed at length by Rieppel [2016]. All of the examples of substitutions that fail to preserve truth here are instances of what Moltmann calls the objectivization effect.…”

“…tive positions are discussed at length byRieppel (2016). All of the examples of substitutions that fail to preserve truth here are instances of what Moltmann calls the objectivization effect.15 This proposal is not uncontroversial.…”

“…21 On the view proposed by Rieppel [2016], predicates (e.g. "happy") and their corresponding definite descriptions (e.g.…”

“…This shows that the invalidity of nominal substitution cannot be due to reference shift. 22 On the view proposed by Rieppel (2016), predicates (e.g. "happy") and their corresponding definite descriptions (e.g.…”

“…The third response to the problem presented by Prior's puzzle is to allow for genuinely nonnominal higher-order quantification. On this proposal, expressions of different semantic types-predicates, quantifiers, and various kinds of verbal complementsrelationship or other that holds between a subject and a proposition, where the nature of this relationship to be spelled out by, for instance, philosophers of mind.30 Here it is instructive to return to the view proposed byRieppel [2016]. If we were to try to extend Rieppel's view to the complements of attitude verbs, his view would encourage us to say that while that-clauses and their corresponding propositional descriptions denote the same things-propositions-they bear different relations to those propositions.…”