Properties And Kinds Of Tropes New Linguistic Facts And Old Philosophical Insights英文电子书.pdf

moltmannframe.fm Page 1 Monday, December 8, 2003 7:47 PM Properties and Kinds of Tropes: New Linguistic Facts and Old Philosophical Insights Friederike Moltmann Terms like ‘wisdom’ are commonly held to refer to abstract objects that are proper- ties. On the basis of a greater range of linguistic data and with the support of some ancient and medieval philosophical views, I argue that such terms do not stand for objects, but rather for kinds of tropes, entities that do not have the status of objects, but only play a role as semantic values of terms and as arguments of predicates. Such ‘non-objects’ crucially differ from objects in that they are not potential bearers of properties. 1. Introduction The idea that properties should be conceived as genuine objects in their own right has been a controversial doctrine throughout the history of philosophy. But it has been much less controversial to assume that nat- ural languages provide us with an easy way for referring to properties, or at least seemingly so to refer. Any property expressed by a predicate can, it appears, in principle act as the referent of a corresponding nom- inalization. Thus, wise, expressing the property of being wise, allows for the nominalization wisdom, which seems to act as a term referring to that same property, allowing for second-order predicates to apply (as in wisdom is rare). In the context of natural language, therefore, properties apparently can act not only as possible meanings of predicates, but also as genuine objects, namely when they are referred to by a nominaliza- tion of a predicate. In this paper, I will question this generally accepted view, that is, that terms like wisdom stand for objects t