Saturday, October 13, 2007

Perfectly Natural Irreducibly Plural Properties

Consider the property of being scattered. It has the logical form: S(xx), where 'xx' takes any plurality as value (including a plurality consisting of only one thing, if one thing can be scattered). The property of being scattered has a fixed adicity (one-place), and it is an intrinsic property (or so it seems).

My question is: Can there be any perfectly natural (fundamental) properties of the logical form F(xx)?

-Einar

1 comment:

Barak said...

Sounds right to me. I can't think of a good reason to rule out plural properties as fundamental...

Here's an argument: Some genuine properties are irreducibly plural [to be argued for elsewhere]. All genuine properties are reducible to fundamental properties. Since there are no singular properties to reduce the plural properties to, some plural properties must be fundamental.