• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Correctness conditions for property nominalists
  • Contributor: Båve, Arvid
  • imprint: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2023
  • Published in: Synthese, 201 (2023) 6
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1007/s11229-023-04206-2
  • ISSN: 1573-0964
  • Keywords: General Social Sciences ; Philosophy
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Nominalists 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.</jats:p>