Armstrong correctly notes that we cannot deny that there are second-class properties
because there are true propositions about them. For example, it is true that red is a
color and that bachelorhood is correlated with loneliness. Armstrong’s remarks here
should feel familiar and not simply because you just read them. Rather, Armstrong’s
remarks echo those medieval philosophers, such as Aquinas and Suárez, who said
very similar things about a different group of second-rate entities, namely, beings of
reason. Recall that, according to Aquinas, there are two proper uses of the word
“being”: thefirst use is to signify things that belong to the categories, that is, the
entities that enjoy non-degenerate existence. But there must also be a sense of“being”
in which entities such as blindness in the eye are beings, since we can form true
affirmative propositions about them. However, this sense mustn’t be taken to be
metaphysically fundamental, for otherwise negations, privations, and the sort would
be full-fledged entities in their own right. Things that are said to be beings in the
second senseposit nothing in reality. They are“an ontological free lunch”; they are
“ontologically nothing more”than their foundations.
Both Armstrong and Aquinas feel similar pressure to recognize in some way the
reality of second-class entities while still holding that these entities are second-class
qua entity. I suggest that in response to similar pressures, similar tactics should be
employed. Aquinas is in better shape than Armstrong when it comes to responding
to the pressure, since he has fundamental modes of being (Aquinas’s categories) that
first-class entities enjoy and a second-rate sense of“being”that beings in the sense of
being-true satisfy.^5 Armstrong needs—and is inchoatelyflapping towards—a similar
distinction.
Consider Armstrong’s claim that the less than natural properties (and the states of
affairs in which theyfigure) are“no additions to being.”Taken at face value, the claim
that something is no addition to being is tantamount to the claim that it does not
exist, for if it were to exist, it would have to becountedamong that which exists and
hence would be anadditionto being. So less than perfectly real properties must be
counted among the existents—and recall that Armstrong says that they are real—but
how can this fact be reconciled with the intuition that they don’t count for much?
How could one existentontologicallycount for less than anotherunless the former is
less real than the latter?
Things that can be counted are things that can be numbered. Some philosophers
claim that there is a close connection between number and existence.^6 There is some
connection: this is shown by the fact that one can represent claims about the number
of things via the apparatus of quantification, identity, and negation. For example, one
(^5) Similarly, the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, recognizes three (or perhaps four orfive)
fundamental categories of things: God,finite substances (immaterial or material), and modes of substances
(immaterial or material). But he also freely quantifies over privations, lacks, and so forth, although he
denies them the status of 6 things—they are neither substances nor modes; see, e.g., Descartes (1992: 203–4).
See, for example, van Inwagen (2001b).