Correctness conditions for property nominalists

Abstract

AbstractNominalists need some account of correctness for sentences committed to the existence of abstract objects. This paper proposes a new statement of such conditions specifically for properties. The account builds on an earlier proposal of mine, but avoids the counter-examples against the latter pointed out by Thomas Schindler, particularly, the sentence ‘There are inexpressible properties’. I argue that the new proposal is independently motivated and more faithful to the spirit of the kind of error-theoretic nominalism that the original proposal was part of. Along the way, I also propose novel treatments of Arthur Pap’s and W.V.O. Quine’s notoriously hard-to-paraphrase sentences about abstracta.