Objects and Properties

"The mug is chipped." Two things are doing different jobs in that sentence. "The mug" picks out a thing. "Is chipped" says how that thing is. The division is so familiar that it takes effort to see it as a claim about the world rather than a fact about English, and the whole of this article is an attempt to say what the claim amounts to.

Things

The definition is deliberately thin, and it earns its keep by what it refuses to build in. It does not say objects are made of matter, so numbers are not excluded by definition. It does not say objects are simple, so a mug with a handle qualifies. It does not say objects last, so a brief flash of light is not ruled out.

The one substantive commitment is the asymmetry. An object bears properties and is not itself borne. Whether that asymmetry is real, or whether an object is nothing more than a bundle of the properties it bears, is one of the standing disputes of the subject. The intermediate tier takes it up under the heading of substrata and bundles. For now, notice that the ordinary way of speaking assumes the asymmetry, and that assuming it is not the same as establishing it.

Ways things are

Properties are individuated more finely than the things that have them. One mug has a great many properties at once, and the same property can be had by many different things. That second point is where the trouble lives.

Two mugs are both chipped. Is there one thing, chippedness, that both have? Or are there two chipped mugs and nothing else, with "chipped" being a word that applies to each of them separately? Almost the entire literature on properties descends from that question, and the ontology ladder devotes a full article to it. This article stays neutral. What is needed here is only the working distinction between a thing and how it is, which every side of that dispute accepts in some form.

What connects them

Saying that the mug is chipped puts a thing and a property together. The name for that putting together is not obvious, because there are two quite different things it might mean.

Keeping these apart is the single most useful discipline in this part of the subject. Predication is something speakers do. Instantiation is what makes what they do come out true. A world with no speakers still has mugs that are chipped, if there are mugs and chipping in it, so instantiation cannot be the same thing as predication.

The separation also explains why predication is a poor guide to what there is. Grammar hands out predicates freely. "Is famous", "is average", "is fictional", and "is not a mug" all attach happily to subjects. It does not follow that there is a property of being not a mug that everything except mugs instantiates. Some philosophers accept exactly that abundance and hold that every meaningful predicate corresponds to a property. Others hold that only some predicates track genuine properties, the ones that carve nature at its joints, and treat the rest as useful shorthand. The dispute has a standard label, sparse versus abundant conceptions of properties, and it recurs throughout the intermediate tier.

Two kinds of property

Not all properties belong to a thing in the same way, and the distinction matters for almost everything later in the tier.

The test that comes most readily to mind is the lonely one. A property is intrinsic if a thing could have it while being the only thing in existence. It works well on the examples. A lone sphere is still spherical; a lone mountain is not the tallest in anything.

David Lewis offered three ways of orientating the distinction, and they are worth having in outline because they come apart. The first is about aboutness: an intrinsic property is one whose having is not about anything besides the thing itself. The second is about determination: intrinsic properties are fixed by the thing's own nature, and nothing outside it can change them without changing it. The third is about duplication: intrinsic properties are exactly those that any perfect duplicate of the thing shares.

These three sound like ways of saying one thing, and the literature does not treat them that way. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the distinction notes that they may well pick out different notions rather than converging on a single one. That is a good early lesson: a distinction can be indispensable in practice and still resist a clean definition.

What has been fixed

There are things, there are ways those things are, and there is whatever it is that holds between the two. This article has not said whether properties exist in addition to the things that have them, nor whether objects are anything over and above their properties. Both questions are live, and both are treated later.

What it has fixed is the vocabulary, precisely enough that those disputes can be stated. The next article uses it immediately, on the distinction between the abstract and the concrete.