A Defense of Campbellian Trope Nominalism
摘要
Nominalism is the view that there are no universals but particulars. Trope Nominalism is a type of Nominalism. According to Trope Nominalism, there are tropes in the world– a trope is a particular nature. A type of Trope Nominalism is Campbellian Trope Nominalism, according to which both a trope’s resemblance relation and numerical distinctness relation to another trope are determined by these two tropes themselves. These two relations are internal relations. Douglas Ehring rejects Campbellian Trope Nominalism. Ehring argues that if both the resemblance relation and the numerical distinctness relation are internal relations, then each trope will have two intrinsic aspects. Since Ehring insists that an entity is not simple if it has more than one intrinsic aspect, all Campbellian tropes are not simple. Since Ehring insists that there must be simple entities, Campbellian Trope Nominalism is not a viable ontology if it contains no simple entities. In this paper, I will defend Campbellian Trope Nominalism by arguing that if we accept Ehring’s argument, there will be no simple entities at all. Since this contradicts Ehring’s assumption that there must be simple entities and if we insist on this assumption, Ehring’s argument is rejected and Campbellian Trope Nominalism is defended.