James Woodbridge, Department of Philosophy, UNLV — A promising newer approach to underwriting property nominalism is via a deflationary account of property-talk, i.e., our talk seemingly about properties, attributes, and the like. As with deflationism about truth-talk, the central idea is that, despite its surface form, property-talk really just provides a first-order, natural-language means for implementing a “higher-order” logical operation, in this case that of second-order quantification into predicate-position.

While this avoids assigning property-talk any descriptive role “about properties”, a common understanding of second-order quantification takes it to range over a domain of properties that serve as the values of the predicate-variables. To avoid thwarting nominalist aspirations in this way, we give a non-nominal interpretation of predicate-quantification in terms of the natural-language adverbial quantifiers already available in English “how-talk”.

We then address two questions that this approach raises:

1. If natural language can already express what property-talk implements on this account, why do we have property-talk?
2. If property-talk’s function is to implement non-nominal, adverbial quantification, how does it fulfill that function, since it seems logically (and ontologically) unsuited for this task?

After answering the first question without relying on the usual “expressive indispensability” assumption, we address the second one by explaining why a pretense account of property-talk provides the best answer.