Abstract
After noting that “the paradigm case of something particular is something in the world, say, an individual table, person, or pen,” Myles Brand says, in an interesting recent paper, that “examples of properties and propositions are also specifiable.”1 Unfortunately he tells us nothing more concerning this latter. Just how are properties and relations specifiable? Brand thinks it is a “plausible working hypothesis” that properties are legitimate objects, as good as “specifiable groupings of particulars” — which presumably sets or classes are. But sets, remember, are specifiable wholly in terms of their membership. A set α is ordinarily regarded as identical with a set β if and only if every member of α is a member of β and conversely. Properties, however, are not specifiably in terms of the particulars that have them. In fact, it is to be feared that no one has ever quite told us adequately just how properties are to be specified, and consequently what the condition for identity between them actually is. It thus seems rather doubtful that the assumption of properties is on a par with that of sets or classes as a plausible working hypothesis. Similar comments apply to the assumption of propositions.
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Notes
‘Particulars, Events, and Actions,’ in Action Theory, edited by M. Brand and D. Walton (D. Reidel, Dordrecht: 1976).
In Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 21–33.
See especially Events, Reference, and Logical Form, pp. 29 ff.
See especially ‘On How Some Adverbs Work,’ in Events, Reference, and Logical Form.
Cf. Events, Reference, and Logical Form, pp. 15 ff.
Cf. ‘On Some Prepositional Relations,’ and ‘On Prepositional Protolinguistics’ in Semiotics and Linguistic Structure.
Cf. also Chapter XII below.
Also in Action Theory.
As in the author’s ‘On Events and Event-Descriptions,’ in Fact and Existence, edited by J. Margolis (Blackwell’s, Oxford: 1969), pp. 63–74 (and also 97–109). Cf. in addition Logic, Language, and Metaphysics, pp. 101 ff.
On paraphrase, see especially H. Hiż, ‘The Role of Paraphrase in Grammar.’
See his Elements of Symbolic Logic, p. 271.
See W. Salmon, ‘Events and Time,’ in Fact and Existence, pp. 95–97.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Martin, R.M. (1979). Events and Actions: Brand and Kim. In: Pragmatics, Truth, and Language. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9457-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9457-7_11
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