Kinds of Tropes without Kinds

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new trope nominalist conception of determinate and determinable kinds of quantitative tropes. The conception is developed as follows. First, we formulate a new account of tropes falling under the same determinates and determinables in terms of internal relations of proportion and order. Our account is a considerable improvement on the current standard account because it does not rely on primitive internal relations of exact similarity or quantitative distance. The internal relations of proportion and order hold because the related tropes exist; no kinds of tropes need to be assumed here. Second, we argue that there are only pluralities of tropes in relations of proportion and order. The tropes mutually connected by the relations of proportion and order form a special type of plurality, tropes belonging to the same kind. Unlike the recent nominalist accounts, we do not identify kinds of tropes with any additional entities (e.g. sets) or abstractions from entities (e.g. pluralities of similar tropes).

How to minimize ontological commitments: a grounding-reductive approach

“…Alternatively, one might think the only things that exist are tropes. And on a minimal ontology, the only tropes that exist might be the determinate masses, charges and spins of the elementary particles-such particles being, for a certain kind of bundle theorist, nothing but collocated or concurrent tropes (Morganti 2009;Keinänen, Hakkarainen, & Keskinen 2018, 2019. Some minimal ontologists likewise posit nothing other than space-time points and perhaps sets of such points, for a so-called "pointillist supersubstantivalism" (Sider 2011(Sider , 2013Dorr 2018).…”