One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.

In The Principles of Mathematics, Russell writes: Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual and entity. The first two emphasize the fact that every term is one, while the third is derived from the fact that every term has being, i.e. (...) is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term'. Now in this remark, a certain extremely general, topic-neutral use of ‘object’ is singled out, a use in which the expression is treated as equivalent to (equally neutral) uses of ‘term’, ‘entity’, ‘unit’, ‘individual’, and ‘thing’. In addition, a claim is made to the effect that the content of the expression, with its emphasis on one, is such as to be adequate to comprehend the sum-total of existence, to include whatever there may be. The paper addresses the question of what this claim means, and whether it might be true. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

The dominant view amongst contemporary Western philosophers about the essence of a natu­ ral object is that it is constituted by its intrinsic properties. The ontological approach salient in the African philosophical tradition, in contrast, accounts for a thing’s essence by appeal to its relational properties. The Afro­relational ontology is under­developed, with the primary aim of this article being to help rectify that weakness. Specifically, this article’s aims are: to articulate an African approach to understanding the essence of a concrete, (...) natural thing in terms of its relationships; to illustrate the Afro­relational approach with the examples of the self and of water; to contrast the Afro­relational characterization of the essence of the self and of water with a typically Western construal in terms of their intrinsic properties; and finally to provide an initial defence of the Afro­relational approach, both by responding to some objections facing it and by providing some new, positive reasons to take it seriously. (shrink)

Kim has defended a solution to the exclusion problem which deploys the «causal inheritance principle» and the identification of instantiations of mental properties with instantiations of their realizing physical properties. I wish to argue that Kim's putative solution to the exclusion problem rests on an equivocation between instantiations of properties as bearers of properties and instantiations as property instances. On the former understanding, the causal inheritance principle is too weak to confer causal efficacy upon mental properties. And on the latter (...) understanding, the identification of mental and physical instantiations is simply untenable. (shrink)