Re: Coextensive properties?

From: patty (pattyNO_at_SPAMicyberspace.net)
Date: 10/13/04 

Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:18:20 GMT

Pierre-Normand Houle wrote:
> "Neil W Rickert" <rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> wrote in message news:ckest7$7t3$1@usenet.cso.niu.edu...
>
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>>"Bill Modlin" <modlin1@metrocast.net> writes:
>>
>>
>>>But my question remains. Can Quine actually intend that we drop the
>>>notion of properties or features of a class, and keep only the notion of
>>>the class itself?
>>
>>Surely, Quine was constructing a reductio ad absurdum.
>>
>>If you think his text was absurd, then he carried out that
>>construction very effectively.
>
>
> I think Quine was quite seriously proposing that we should
> dispense, in serious ontology, with talk of properties and speak
> instead of extensions of predicates : classes of objects. His argument,
> that Modlin quotes above, does not seem at all to have the form of
> a reductio.
>
> Elsewhere, ("A Logistical Approach to the Ontological Problem")
> he has argued, famously, that "to be is to be the value of a variable".
> What, in the world, can counts as the value of a variable, depends
> of the language we use to talk about the world. It is on pragmatic
> grounds that Quine has argued that, in scientifically useful languages,
> properties will not appear as values of bound variables.
>
> More recently, ontologists such as Crawford Elder, have argued,
> quite persuasively, in my view, that we can not dispense with properties
> since the objective having of many of them are essential to objects
> belonging to natural kinds that both science and common sense
> recognize. Properties are not only real, they are essential for some
> objects' existing, and they carry empirical load : they can not be bent,
> gerrymandered, permuted with one another, etc. without loosing
> all value in causal explanations.
>

"X is a member of class P", or "X has property P" have the exact same
logical consequences in every sentence that we could write. In fact we
can always replace the one syntax with the other, without disturbing
the consequences in the slightest. Whatever metaphysical "essence" that
one *thinks* one is attributing to objects by naming their properties
certainly does not make any difference to the logical consequences of
the formulae. It can never make a difference in a prediction. Is that
not a fact?

I think objecting to properties because people might think they are
"essences" is a red herring. Avoiding properties because Quine said
"For science it is classes SI, properties NO", yet not being able to
state specifically where it makes a difference, is just stupid.

patty

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