First talk (Nov 15, 06): Explicit Reference to Tropes
Second talk (Nov 17, 06): Implicit Reference to Tropes
Friederike Moltmann
Abstract:
Tropes, concrete manifestations of properties in objects, have played an important role in ancient and medieval philosophy and have received renewed interest in contemporary metaphysics. In these talks I will show that tropes also play a central and pervasive role in the semantics of natural language. Natural language, I will argue in the first talk, makes explicit reference to tropes (or trope-like entities) with nominalizations like 'the redness of the apple', 'John's humility', or 'John's belief that S', and even with functional expressions like 'the number of the planets' and 'the extent of Mary's anger'. The recognition that such expressions make reference to to tropes rather than abstract objects in turn bears on a number of philosophical issues that relate to those expressions. In the second talk I will argue that natural language also makes implicit reference to tropes, in a range of different constructions, such as comparatives, and in particular comparatives with 'same' and 'different', both of the sort 'John is the same he always was' and 'relative identity statements' like 'This is the same man as that'. I will also argue that reference to tropes is fundamentally different from reference to events.
Last Modified: October 17, 2006