Properties, Nominalisms and Things That Can Be Said

According to van Inwagen’s theory of the property role, properties are ‘things that can be said of things’. Although this theory is, as its proponent says, ‘very nearly vacuous’, it has in his view an impressive list of substantive consequences about the nature of properties – in particular, it entails that properties are abstract and universal, and thus that nominalism is false. In this paper, I argue that 1) the very idea of a thing that can be said of things is less clear than van Inwagen seems to believe, since it can admit of two different interpretations; 2) in one of these interpretations, which is perfectly coherent and defensible even though it is not van Inwagen’s preferred one, the idea fails to entail that properties are universal, and it is far from clear that it entails that properties are abstract. Therefore, the idea that properties are things that can be said of things does not imply Platonism about properties.