Properties and Hyperintensionality : A Study in Property Individuation

This book defends property hyperintensionalism: a view of property individuation according to which properties can be distinct even if they are necessarily had by the exact same entities.

This book defends property hyperintensionalism: a view of property individuation according to which properties can be distinct even if they are necessarily had by the exact same entities. J. J. Snodgrass brings order to the debate over property individuation between property hyperintensionalism and property intensionalism, a rival view according to which such properties are identical, and argues that property hyperintensionalism earns its place in metaphysics. After giving some background on the concepts of a property and a criterion of identity, Snodgrass motivates property hyperintensionalism first by cataloguing a wide range of intuitively distinct properties that are necessarily had by the exact same entities, and second by attending to the different relations these properties bear to one another, both of which bring out the limits of property intensionalism. The discussion that follows takes up numerous objections against property hyperintensionalism. These include claims that the view relies on properties that are distinct but not necessarily had by the exact same entities; that it confuses a single property with some linguistic and/or mental representational surrogate of that property; that it allows properties to stand in necessary connections; and that it sits uneasily with theoretical and methodological evaluative criteria, such as parsimony and overfitting. In the final chapter, Snodgrass turns to the objection that property hyperintensionalism pays insufficient attention to the hyperintension of a property, and in response proposes a hyperintensional theory of property individuation. He also provides results the theory delivers about the individuation of properties and applies the theory to similarity judgements, the sparse/abundant and qualitative/non-qualitative distinctions, as well as to the concept of naturalness. This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional philosophers working on the topic of hyperintensionality in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic.