Is objective and absolute knowledge possible? Objective and absolute knowledge is knowledge that is not conditional or qualified, in other words relative. Response: a universal exists if it is instantiated at some time. What about universals that are not currently instantiated for example, being 250,000,000,000 miles long, do they exist? How can redness exist 10 feet away from itself? This leads to the problem of instantiation.Īristotle argued they exist in space and time- but at many points in space at the same time. They exist independently of all particulars, therefore outside space and time. What is a Universal? Plato argued universals are forms. How do we know about universals, according to realists? Empirically, via the particulars that instantiate them. Do all predicates refer to universals, according to realists? No, only those that appear in explanations, other predicates such as witches are 'merely' ideas. How do particulars 'instantiate' universals? Universals are atemporal and metaphysical how do they become associated to particulars that are physical and temporal. The particular and the universal are related, this is 'instantiation' (another universal), and so on. For example, when does turquoise become green?Īristotle argued that realism faces an infinite regress. But psychologists have recently argued that this 'either is or isn't' is too simplistic. Problems for Realism On the realist account, things either have a universal or not. For example, 'blue' exists wholly in each blue thing. Universals are constants, they cannot be divided. Instantiation: what the particulars have in common is the universal. In what follows we use “ \(\vartriangleleft \)” to denote the one to many relation of being at least partially grounded in, assuming that this relation links facts (see Correia 2020 for a general introduction to the notion of grounding), and “ \(\)” to denote the fact corresponding to the proposition that \(\phi \) (hence, “ \([\text \) exists.All realists believe Many particulars can display the same universal. 5, we put into question two of the basic principles Costa’s argument is based on. 4 we advance the idea that there is a tension between the polyhedric notion of ontological dependence and the notion of grounding, and we articulate a version of Aristotelianism about universals in terms of different kinds of dependence which again is immune from Costa’s argument. 3, granting the assumption that the notion of ontological dependence can be characterized in terms of grounding, we show that there are different and definitely promising formulations of Aristotelianism about universals which are immune from the charge presented by Costa. In the next section, we provide a reconstruction of the argument. The aim of this paper is both to assess Costa’s argument, by exploring how it can be resisted, and to shed light on some problems that arise in characterizing the notion of ontological dependence in terms of grounding. The argument, which has the merit of presenting a first precise formal formulation of the Aristotelian thesis, shows that this version of Aristotelianism about universals, together with some plausible principles about relations, exemplification and grounding, leads to contradiction. In a recent paper, Costa has put forward an argument against Aristotelianism about universals by relying on one precise formulation of the Aristotelian thesis, according to which the existence of a universal is grounded in its being exemplified by something (Costa 2019). The precise formulation of a consistent Aristotelian view of universals, however, is not an easy task, primarily due to the fact that the notion of ontological dependence involved in this view is far from being transparent. To be an Aristotelian about universals is to hold that universals depend for their existence on their exemplifiers.
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