<p>Facts (and, more generally, states of affairs) are plausibly individuated in an at least moderately coarse-grained way: the fact that this rose is red should not be distinguished from the fact that this rose fails to fail to be red. Something similar can be said for properties and relations. It is relatively easy to formulate principles that entail that the individuation of states of affairs, properties, and relations—in brief, intensional entities—is coarse-grained enough to conform to this idea. It is less easy to devise a complementary principle that imposes an <i>upper</i> bound on the coarse-grainedness of intensional entities. A promising approach to this problem is to formulate a principle according to which the <i>fundamental</i> entities (including fundamental properties and relations) are freely recombinable or ‘logically independent’; but certain special provisions that have to be made with regard to relations tend to render such a principle unattractively complex. In this paper I put forward a simpler principle, based on a broadly positionalistic conception of relations.</p>

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Towards an Ontology of Roles and States

  • Jan Plate

摘要

Facts (and, more generally, states of affairs) are plausibly individuated in an at least moderately coarse-grained way: the fact that this rose is red should not be distinguished from the fact that this rose fails to fail to be red. Something similar can be said for properties and relations. It is relatively easy to formulate principles that entail that the individuation of states of affairs, properties, and relations—in brief, intensional entities—is coarse-grained enough to conform to this idea. It is less easy to devise a complementary principle that imposes an upper bound on the coarse-grainedness of intensional entities. A promising approach to this problem is to formulate a principle according to which the fundamental entities (including fundamental properties and relations) are freely recombinable or ‘logically independent’; but certain special provisions that have to be made with regard to relations tend to render such a principle unattractively complex. In this paper I put forward a simpler principle, based on a broadly positionalistic conception of relations.