Review

Reviewed Work(s): Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. by D. M. Armstrong

Review by: Jerrold Levinson
Source: The Philosophical Review , Jul., 1992, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 654-660
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2186070

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 BOOK REVIEWS

number of competing views on the problem of universals, reformulated in

the opening chapter as the question of "what distinguishes the classes of
tokens that mark off a type from those classes that do not" (13). The
problem of universals, in other words, is the problem of explaining what
the fact that the objects of the world appear to fall into types or kinds
amounts to or rests on. The two standard responses in the history of
philosophy have been labeled realism and nominalism: the former maintains
that the explanation of the fact in question requires, in addition to objects
themselves, the posit of attributes possessed by or qualifying such objects,
whereas the latter claims to do without such posit. Armstrong reviews at
length two forms of nominalism, natural-class nominalism and resem-
blance nominalism, and two forms of realism, universal attributism ("uni-
versals theory") and particular attributism ("trope theory"). The two forms
of nominalism differ in regard to what is taken as primitive, or insuscept-
ible of further analysis, in their attempts to account for the evident phe-
nomenon of types: naturalness of classes or resemblance between indi-
viduals. The two forms of realism differ in their conception of the attrib-
utes of things, which are the foundation of their coalescing into types, as
either shared and repeatable, or else nonrepeatable and nonshared. A
third variety of nominalism, predicate nominalism, is regarded by Arm-
strong as too counterintuitive to merit much discussion, and a third variety
of realism, which would embrace both tropes and universals, is noted but
dismissed as ontologically profligate in comparison with its competitors.
Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to nominalism, and the many difficulties-
for example, that of the contingency of class membership-that nominal-
ism entails as an answer to the problem of universals are expertly detailed.
According to Armstrong, the best form of nominalism is a resemblance
nominalism appealing to particularized natures-the undifferentiated to-
tality of how a thing is-as the foundation of resemblances, which then
supervene in an ontologically costless way on such natures. Final appeal to
them, rather than to resemblances per se, gives resemblance nominalism
the capacity to account for belonging to a type even in the case of objects
alone in their worlds, which have nothing to resemble. Yet even such a
nominalism founders on the most intractable difficulties, such as the non-
extensionality of typehood. Armstrong is correct in observing that nomi-
nalism offers only a "false economy" in ontology, not according the world
enough of the structure it actually has (58).
Chapter 4, which acts as a buffer between the nominalist views reviewed
in the preceding two chapters and the realist views to be canvassed in the
succeeding two, is concerned with the nature of particulars, and the ques-
tion of how they stand to the attributes they instantiate-assuming, with
the retirement of nominalism, that there are such. Two models of the
constitution of particulars are considered: the substance-attribute theory,

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 BOOK REVIEWS

and the bundle-of-universals theory. Among the problems of the bundle

theory recalled by Armstrong is its entailment of the Identity of Indiscern-
ibles, which principle is arguably false, on either its strong or weak con-
strual. Regarding the alternate substance-attribute model, Armstrong
notes that a plausible candidate for the substantial possessor of a thing's
attributes, namely place-times (or spatiotemporal positions), will not in the
last analysis serve, since it is logically possible for two distinct objects to
exist at the very same place and time. Yet the notion that at an object's
metaphysical core, possessing its properties, is an unqualified some-
what-a "bare particular"-is more unacceptable still. This leaves the idea
that the possessor of a thing's properties is somehow just that thing itself,
perhaps regarded in a certain light.
This is where Armstrong's distinction between "thin" and "thick" par-
ticulars, which is supposed to dispel some of the conceptual fog surround-
ing the question of what can intelligibly have the properties of a thing,
comes in. The thin particular is the particular taken apart from its properties;
as such it has, but is not the same as, those properties. The thick particular
is the particular thought of as involving its properties; it is virtually the same as,
but does not have, its properties. (A thick particular is thus tantamount to
a state of affairs-which no universals theory, Armstrong observes, can do
without (88-89).) So in one sense an object is propertyless (thin particular),
whereas in another it includes its properties within itself (thick particular).
Much as I admire this attempt to rethink the puzzling relation of things
to their attributes,' I have some residual skepticism. For the notion of a
thin particular is still a rather troubling one. The thick particular, as a state
of affairs, clearly exists, but can the same be said of the thin particular?
The thin particular is the particular with its attributes "abstracted away,"
but what exactly does that amount to? It can't mean "without," since how-
ever we think about the particular, it still retains, in actuality, the attributes
we mask off in thought. A dilemma beckons: the thin particular is only an
artifact of abstract reflection, while the thick particular, whose existence is
by comparison incontrovertible, is indistinguishable from a state of affairs
in which substance and attributes have already been fused in determinate
fashion. The propertied object itself, it seems, has eluded us once more.
Armstrong has useful things to say in response to the famous regress
argument concerning the "fundamental tie" of instantiation required to
constitute states of affairs from objects and attributes. In Armstrong's
formulation, if a instantiates F, then the state of affairs ao's being F, a case

'Anticipated in part, however, by D. C. Long in "Particulars and Their Qualities,"

Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1968), which Armstrong fails to mention.

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 BOOK REVIEWS

of instantiation, will instantiate the property instantiation, and t

state of affairs, not's being F's instantiating instantiation, will also i
instantiation, and so on, ad infinitum. Armstrong's response to the r
to declare it harmless, since all the levels of instantiation after th
contingent one, are merely logical byproducts without ontological im-
port-not really additional states of affairs at all. While this helps, I would
suggest an additional response. We can leave it moot whether these higher
levels of instantiation really are anything metaphysically or not, and simply
observe that they don't appear to threaten the constitution of the primary
state of affairs (this was Bradley's worry) if we keep in mind that the initial
instantiation at most generates, but does not presuppose, the remainder of
the series.
Chapter 5 is the heart of this compact book, and the author intelligently
exercises a number of issues universalism must address in addition to those
just recalled. One of the most important of these concerns what universals
there in fact are. Armstrong adopts a naturalized, scientific realist stance to
the question, eschewing semantic considerations as misguided, and taking
his cue only from the totality of developing science, especially physics. The
true monadic universals will be properties of mass, charge, extension, and
so on, whereas our ordinary types-for example, red, wet, horse, gigolo-
will reveal themselves as only rough-and-ready classifications of reality,
corresponding to no properties worthy of the name.
While understanding Armstrong's motivation in ultimate explanation
here, I feel he goes too far in the direction of a not quite innocuous
reductionism. That classifications are coarse or oblique from the point of
view of fundamental physical magnitudes into which one might try to
resolve them does not seem to me to impugn their status as universals.
Armstrong appears almost to doom holistic, gestaltish, emergent proper-
ties-ones which human experience would have an ineliminable role in
grasping and grounding-by fiat.
Attempting to further delimit the sphere of true universals, Armstrong
argues, partly on grounds of causal efficacy, against the existence of dis-
junctive and negative universals, and for the existence of conjunctive ones.
I concur; but it is worth observing in the name of the a priori method from
which Armstrong wishes to distance himself on these matters that these
results seem to fall out readily enough merely upon linguistic or concep-
tual reflection. Not being 0 is not a way of being at all, and being 0 or 'F is
not a way of being; whereas being 0 and 'F is indeed a, albeit complex, way
of being.
I turn now to the issue of uninstantiated universals, to whose existence
Armstrong is firmly opposed. He argues at one point that if we think of
properties as ways things are rather than as things themselves, we are less

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 BOOK REVIEWS

likely to countenance uninstantiated properties. But as a proponent of the

suggestion that properties be conceived of as ways,2 I am inclined to dis-
agree. As Armstrong admits, ways things are generalizes easily, one might
say unavoidably, to ways things could be. Given that, it is hard to see why
Armstrong asserts that once properties are conceived as ways, it is "pro-
foundly unnatural to think of these ways as floating free from things" (97).
That is true, to my mind, only in an oblique sense, namely, that we cannot
understand what it is to be a certain way without assuming a notion of
things, or substantives, that might be that way; in other words, for us to get
a handle on the property of being red it has to be the case that we have a
handle on things like balls, berets, and bicycles that could be the way in
question. It doesn't follow, however, that the reality of the way of being
itself would be threatened merely because there happened contingently to
be no red objects. Ways of being, with which properties can be roughly
identified, are as it were inherently potentialities: they are the modes of
existing available to, possible for, things.
This takes us to Armstrong's next reason for not embracing uninstan-
tiated universals, which is that they have gained support, unfairly in his
estimation, from "the widespread idea that it is sufficient for a universal to
exist if it is merely possible that it should be instantiated" (80). But he
shows that he misconstrues this idea, and the support it is supposed to give,
in what follows: "But for myself I do not see the force of the argument.
Philosophers do not reason that way about particulars. They do not argue
that it is empirically possible that present-day France should be a monar-
chy and therefore that the present king of France exists, although, unfor-
tunately for French royalists, he is not instantiated" (81). Armstrong's
rejoinder is thus that philosophers don't infer from possibility to existence
where particulars are concerned, so why should they with universals? But
a paradigm argument of this sort is not, say, "the attribute, being chilia-
lateral (i.e., having one thousand sides) is possible, therefore it exists," but
rather, "it is possible for a plane figure to be chilialateral, therefore the
attribute (way of being) being chilialateral exists." Armstrong fails to see that
attributes just in effect are possibilities of being, so that if a certain manner
of being is possible to have, then that manner of being, however abstractly,
exists.

2See my "Properties and Related Entities," Philosophy and Phenomenological Re-

search 39 (1978), and "The Particularisation of Attributes," Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 58 (1980), to which papers the fourth chapter of David Seargent's Plu-
rality and Continuity (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), the only
source cited by Armstrong, is largely beholden.

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 BOOK REVIEWS

Armstrong tries additionally to burden uninstantiated universals with

the need of a special, disreputable, place to put them, namely "Platonic
Heaven" (76), but this is surely a bum rap. There is no reason why un-
instantiated properties cannot be thought of as belonging to the ordinary
space-time world, as part of its fabric, but without being at definite loca-
tions-any more than are instantiated relations among actual objects, on
Armstrong's own admission (98-99).
Armstrong skeptically asks whether having mass M, where M is a deter-
minate value, could exist without being the mass of something (73). But
reflection on this kind of property rather pushes us further in the direc-
tion of uninstantiated universals, I believe. That being five kilograms in mas
could exist without that property ever attaching to any concrete thing
seems less objectionable than that being four kilograms in mass and being six
kilograms in mass would exist, courtesy of corresponding chunks of lead,
whereas being five kilograms in mass would not, if no portion of matter of the
right size ever materialized. It's implausible that there could be in a world
only partial and spotty representation of properties forming a natural and
continuous series. Similarly, Armstrong's requirement of the necessary
instantiation, but only somewhere in time, of any existent universal yields
its own unintuitive results. For example, it might be that being salmon-and-
mauve-spotted exists, but only because it will be exemplified in Bali in the
year 2000, while being beige-and-puce-striped does not exist, because nothing
ever displays that look, though its components are ready to hand.
In chapter 6 Armstrong gives an unbiased account of the main realist
competitor to universalism, namely tropism, or the theory of attributes as
particulars. Armstrong regards the debate between the two theories as
almost a toss-up, finding that virtually all the standing problems can be
handled equally well by either view. But I think universalism's suit is stron-
ger than that. My reasons, in brief, are these: (1) the notion of a particu-
larized attribute is arguably parasitic on that of an ordinary, that is, uni-
versal, one; (2) the only coherent story concerning the particularization of
attributes takes qualities (e.g., redness), not properties (e.g., being red), as
its subject-the notion of a particularized, unshareable way of being being
virtually oxymoronic; but qualities are metaphysically much more suspect
than properties; (3) the individuation problems for tropes go beyond the
"intelligibility of swapping problem" posed at the end of Armstrong's com-
parative survey of the two theories (131-32); the properties of objects in
near-identity relations, for example, sculptures and hunks of clay, gener-
ate uncomfortable puzzles on a trope conception of them; and finally, (4)
if the admission of uninstantiated attributes is, as Armstrong observes
(122), incompatible with a particularized conception of attributes, then so
much the worse for such a conception.

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 BOOK REVIEWS

In sum, despite my differences on a number of points-really amount-

ing only to a family quarrel-this is a splendid book.

JERROLD LEVINSON
University of Maryland

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 3 (July 1992)

A COMBINATORIAL THEORY OF POSSIBILITY. By D. M. ARMSTRONG.

New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiii, 156.

It is a tribute to the viability of the doctrine of possible worlds that it can

get support from what might seem unlikely quarters. But if you are un-
willing to postulate them outright as primitive entities then you will have to
make them up out of the things you favor using principles of combination
that you accept. David Armstrong favors simple individuals and simple
universals. Unlike many philosophers he does not accept set theory for his
principles of combination. He does not explicitly list what principles he
does accept, but they seem to amount to these: He allows the formation of
mereological sums of entities, and therefore allows a part-whole relation.
He allows that combination of a universal and an individual (or if the
universal is a relation, an ordered collection of individuals) that constitutes
the individual's "possessing" the universal. This complex is called the state
of affairs constituted by that thing having that property (or those things
standing in that relation), and only exists when that obtains. Actually Arm-
strong is inclined to take individuals and universals ontologically as ab-
stractions from states of affairs, but as he gives no account of abstraction
it is better to take individuals and universals as primitive. States of affairs
can be conjoined, even infinitely many of them, and it is such conjunctions
that are to form possible worlds.
Swapping intuitions about primitives is easy but profitless. More inter-
esting is whether Armstrong's can yield a plausible account of modality.
One of the driving forces is that the account be a naturalistic one, and he
understands this to require him to make the worlds out of things that exist
in this world. Many of the difficulties for a combinatorial view are consid-
ered. I shall discuss the one that seems to me the most important.
If every combination of simple properties and relations among individ-
uals is to count as a possible world, then we must be sure that no one simple
state of affairs should either logically entail or logically preclude any other.
This requirement may seem circular if logical relations are to be analyzed
in terms of worlds, but one could say that we begin with certain intuitions
about what does or does not count as possible and it is a requirement of the
analysis that its simples satisfy the independence demand. That is part of
what it means to call them simple. However, as Armstrong recognizes, this
is not enough, especially as he holds that it is up to science to discover what

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