Agradecimentos: This article was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). I am particularly indebted to Mark H. Bickhard (Lehigh University, USA) and Andrea Raimondi (Thapar University, India) for reading and criticizing early versions of this article. I must also thank the anonymous referees, without whom the article would inevitably have suffered from specific as well as structural weaknesses. I am also indebted to Lesley Swanson, who kindly helped me brush up on my English. Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Saõ Paulo (FAPESP) (The Saõ 27 Paulo Research Foundation), Grant no 2018/16465-6 Ver menos

Abstract: The paper discusses some formal difficulties concerning the theory of universals of Trope-Only ontologies, from which the formal theory of predication advanced by Trope-Only theorists seems to be irremediably affected. It is impossible to lay out a successful defense of a Trope-Only theory without Russellian types, but such types are ontologically inconsistent with tropes’ nominalism. Historically, Tropists’ first way to avoid the problem is appealing to the supervenience claim, which however fails on its terms and, thus, fails as a ground for a solution to the higher-order or ‘type’ problem. A later solution involves the invariance of primitive equivalence relations in order to make universals ontologically innocuous. However, I argue that this latter solution fails to meet the requirements imposed on an ontologically unbiased nominalist attitude. So, this paper discusses how Trope-Only theories alter standard formal moves in Nominalism, and also is interested in clarifying further the formal assumptions for these problems Ver menos