Take Away Every Property of an Object. Is Anything Left?
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
One answer says an object is nothing more than its properties collected together, with no underlying thing holding them, and the alternative says there must be something underneath.
The question being asked
Consider an apple, which is red, round, sweet and about a certain weight. Strip away the redness, the roundness, the sweetness and every other property in turn. The question is whether anything remains when the list is exhausted. One position says no, and that the apple simply is that collection of properties occurring together, with nothing else involved. The other says yes, and that there must be something underlying which has the properties, since properties cannot float unattached and something must be the thing that is red.
The case for each
Both positions rest on a strong intuition:
- •Nothing is ever encountered except properties
- •So postulating something beneath them adds an unobservable
- •Against that, properties seem to require a bearer
- •And an object survives losing and gaining properties over time
- •Which suggests something persists through the changes
- •That something would have no properties of its own, which is odd
The problem of identical things
The strongest objection to the first position concerns two things exactly alike. If an object is nothing but its properties, then two objects with all the same properties are the same object, which seems wrong, since a universe containing two identical spheres and nothing else appears perfectly coherent. Defenders respond by including position among the properties, which distinguishes them, and critics reply that this smuggles in the very thing being denied. The dispute is unresolved and the thought experiment has generated a great deal of argument since Max Black proposed it in 1952.
The third option
A middle position is defended by those who find both extremes unsatisfying, and it is worth stating because it is where much of the recent work sits. On that view an object is a bundle of properties, and the properties are particular to it rather than shared universals, so the redness of this apple is a distinct item from the redness of that one even if the two are exactly alike. That move answers the objection about identical objects directly, since two similar spheres have numerically different properties, and it avoids postulating anything underneath. It requires accepting that properties come one to a customer, which some find equally strange.
Why it is not only about objects
The same argument applies to persons and that is where it bites hardest. David Hume looked for a self underlying his experiences and reported finding only the experiences themselves, concluding that a person is a bundle of perceptions with no additional owner. Buddhist analysis reached a closely comparable conclusion independently and much earlier, treating the self as a collection of processes with no permanent core. Both face the same question about what makes today's collection the same person as yesterday's, and both answer it by pointing to continuity and connection rather than to an underlying thing.
The takeaway
One position says an object simply is its properties occurring together, since nothing else is ever encountered, and the other says properties need a bearer that persists through change. Two exactly similar objects are the standard objection, answered by counting position as a property and disputed ever since. Applied to persons, the first position is Hume's, and Buddhist analysis reached it earlier.