Are There Fundamental Intrinsic Properties?

Abstract

David Armstrong once said: There is a certain picture of the physical world that we all cherish in our hearts, although in our philosophical thinking we may consider ourselves forced to abandon it in a greater or lesser degree. According to this picture, the physical world, including our bodies, consists of a single realm of material objects, and perhaps other objects, related in space and enduring and changing in time. Material objects have shape and size, they move or are at rest, they are hot or cold, hard or soft, rough or smooth, heavy or light, they are coloured, they may have a taste, and they may emit sounds or smells. These properties of objects are, on occasion, perceived; but objects continue to have these properties in a perfectly straightforward way when, as is usually the case, the objects, or particular properties of the objects, are not perceived. This is the picture of the physical world to which we are all instinctively drawn (even Berkeley was). We may think that relatively abstruse evidence garnered from scientific investigations forces us to modify this picture. But it is the picture we have gained through perception, and when we are not considering perception as philosophers, we do not think that the evidence of ordinary perception tends to overthrow it in any way. (1968, pp. 239–40)