Markus Gabriel (2015:49-51) – propriedades

Properties are introduced in order to explain the difference between individuals. Properties that serve this job without generating paradox can be called ‘proper properties’. A proper property accordingly is a property reference to which puts one into the position of distinguishing one object from another in a domain. In particular, individuals differ from each other by having different proper properties. We can now change our understanding of individuals and claim more generally that individuals are objects that have proper properties. A first and still rough understanding of the concept object would have it that it is anything that can become the content of a truth-apt thought. As I will lay out in more detail in Part II, these definitions actually have to be further qualified. However, at this point in the argument we can think of individuals as individuated by their proper properties, of facts as being truths about individuals, and of objects as the contents of truth-apt thoughts.

Traditionally, individuals are understood as completely determined objects, as entia omnimodo determinata, a criterion I will be rejecting. On the traditional model, what determines an individual as this rather than that other individual are its properties, and it is indeed hard to see how an individual could lack one of its properties: the cat has the property of being furry and is thereby distinguished from the Empire State Building (which as far as I know has never been successfully referred to as furry). The cat has its properties just as much as the Empire State Building or (50) the number 273 have their properties. The fact that cats are often furry and that the number 273 is bigger than the number 2 do not obtain because we are interested in them, even though we only found out that they obtained because we were interested in them for some reason or other.

Individuals certainly are not literally different from their properties, for their properties define what they are. There is a sense in which some properties can justifiably be regarded as more essential, as long as this does not mislead us into thinking that there is a realm of essences delineated by some overall criterion of ‘naturalness’ or ‘eliteness’. There is no essence of essences, that is, nothing that generally makes it the case that all objects share some essence, such as only contingently having disjunctive properties or being a four-dimensional thing, say. Also, there is no independent reason for identifying individuals with some particular kind of individuals. Not all individuals are spatio-temporal, for example, and I believe that space-time is highly overrated in metaphysics as a principle of individuation — it is emphasised much more than in some self-descriptions of contemporary physics, which can itself do without space-time on some levels. But there is no need to consult physics at this point given that we are not even engaged in metaphysics, but in ontology. We are on a journey to answering the question what ‘existence’ means, and not trying to uncover the fundamental nature of nature or the most fundamental layer of the universe. In his 1918 lectures on the Philosophy of Logical Atomism Russell already aptly remarked in a discussion of the existence of numbers, phantoms, and images (meaning: imagined objects):

I know that this belief in the physical world has established a sort of reign of terror. You have got to treat with disrespect whatever does not fit into the physical world. But that is really very unfair to the things that do not fit in. They are just as much there as the things that do. The physical world is a sort of governing aristocracy, which has somehow managed to cause everything else to be treated with disrespect. That sort of attitude is unworthy of a philosopher. We should treat with exactly equal respect the things that do not fit in with the physical world, and images are among them.

That the number 273 and the witches in Faust not only exist, but are also individuals should be obvious: they have all the properties (51) they need in order to be what they are (even if the witches differ from, say, Tony Blair by not having all the properties a typical human being has, such as having a determinate number of hairs), and they are also clearly different from each other by virtue of their properties, even though there still is an interesting problem for semantics tied to the question of whether the fact that the witches in Faust have all their properties means that they are really individuals. It has often been argued in the philosophy of fiction — or rather in the philosophy of the semantics of fiction — that fictional characters are not completely determined, as we do not know, for instance, whether the witches in Faust have ever been to Paris or whether they are extremely hairy. There seems to be no fact of the matter deciding these questions. Yet, I will maintain throughout this book that this does not conflict with the fact that these witches are individuals, as they are satisfactorily determined for them to be referred to. They might not be completely determined, but they are satisfactorily determined. Complete determination is not necessary for individuals, even though individuals trivially do not lack any property they have, which is not to say that they are completely determined. The difference between witches in a work of fiction and actual people on planet earth might be that witches in fiction do different things, and that for some things it is unclear whether they do them or could have done them. Also, they might lack properties that typical actual people on planet earth have. Maybe witches in a fiction are not eligible for a certain hairstyle, which would not make them incomplete or more paradoxical for ontology.