LOFUPRO · The Logical Function of Property Talk

Properties are those things that we attribute to objects, such as the property of being red or the property of being a prime number. Talk of properties is ubiquitous throughout the sciences and everyday language, and raises difficult philosophical questions as to the nature and existence of properties. The research project offers a novel deflationary account of the notion of property. Deflationary accounts of some concept typically deny that there is something that all objects falling under the relevant concept have in common, and hence that traditional attempts to analyse these concepts are misguided. For example, according to the deflationary theory of truth, the predicate ""is true"" is unlike predicates such as ""is red"". Whereas the latter picks out some salient feature of reality, this is not the case with the former: ""is true"" was only introduced into our language to serve a certain logical function. For instance, we cannot assert all theorems of arithmetic one by one as there are infinitely many of them