Introduction

Summary

This collection reprints almost all my previously published papers in metaphysics and epistemology, except for those that were previously reprinted in another collection. There is also one previously unpublished paper. Still omitted are three book reviews and four rejoinders. I have taken the opportunity to correct typographical errors and editorial alterations. But I have left the philosophical content as it originally was, rather than trying to rewrite the papers as I would write them today.

The first six papers have to do with properties. ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’ marked a big turning point in my philosophical position. Formerly I had been persuaded by Goodman and others that all properties were equal: it was hopeless to try to distinguish ‘natural’ properties from gruesomely gerrymandered, disjunctive properties. Eventually I was persuaded, largely by D. M. Armstrong, that the distinction I had rejected was so commonsensical and so serviceable - indeed, was so often indispensable - that it was foolish to try to get on without it. We should accept it as primitive if need be; or we should admit that we understand whatever else it may take to explain it. What else? – Here we have several choices: among them, a suitable version of a primitive similarity relation; or perhaps a sparse theory of universals, as advocated by Armstrong.

‘Putnam's Paradox’ expands the part of ‘New Work’ devoted to arguing that the distinction between natural and gerrymandered properties - if indeed we're prepared to grant that we can understand such a distinction - serves to answer Putnam's famous ‘model-theoretic argument’ for extreme semantic indeterminacy, and thence for the automatic truth of ideal theories.