TRYING TO DISPENSE WITH PARTICULARS

We are attempting to develop a theory of states of affairs, to be followed up by arguing that states of affairs are all there is to reality. States of affairs, we said, involve properties and relations, properties and relations which are universals rather than particulars (tropes). We now turn our attention to the particulars which instantiate these universals.

The question that immediately arises is whether we really need to recognize an independent category of particularity. May it not be possible to give an account of particulars in terms of properties and relations alone? Various intellectual motives may drive such a strategy. First, there are the epistemological difficulties thought to be involved in postulating particulars which are surplus to their properties and relations. The properties and the relations can be known. The bearer of properties and relations, it is alleged, cannot be known. Why then postulate a bearer? Second, the postulation of bearers appears to lack ontological as well as epistemic economy. Once we have admitted properties into our ontology, we presumably have the bundle of a particular's properties. Why have a bearer in addition? The postulation of a bearer of universals may be thought to be uneconomical in special degree, because a Dualism of particulars and universals has been introduced at the bottom of reality. For some or all of these reasons it may be thought better to construe particulars as bundles of properties.