Mark Jago: "Constructing Properties"

Mark Jago, University of Nottingham: "Constructing Properties"

Abstract
This talk develops a constructive account of properties. Non-fundamental properties -- e.g., colour, charge-to-mass ratio -- are, I argue, logically complex constructions out of more fundamental ones, built using two metaphysical construction operations: fusion and fork. These behave like conjunction and disjunction applied to properties (and to entities of other metaphysical categories). Fundamental properties themselves are cashed out via Wolff's (2020) property spaces: structured relational domains, on close analogy with space-time, within which a fundamental property is simply a position.

I then use this construction to recapture the notion of a determinable property -- roughly, as a fork whose disjuncts are drawn from a single property space -- and ask to what extent this recovers the principles we typically expect to hold of the determinable-determinate relation. Most survive as straightforward consequences of the construction; one holds only by stipulation, built into how `determinable' is defined.

The resulting picture is offered as a first step in a larger project: making metaphysical sense of fundamental physical fields, and understanding how the seemingly object-free ontology of fundamental physics might give rise to an ontology of material objects.