What is the problem of universals?

Abstract

Although the Problem of Universals is one of the oldest philosophical problems, and has been discussed at length for many centuries, philosophers have not always been clear about its nature. As Alex Oliver makes clear, there are two basic issues about which philosophers are not clear: one is the issue about what is supposed to be explained or accounted for by a solution to the Problem of Universals and the other is the issue about what sort of explanation or account should a solution to the problem be (Oliver 1996, pp. 49−50). There are then two different but related questions to be answered: What are the explananda of a solution to the Problem of Universals?, and What sort of explanation should we give of those explananda? The aim of this article is not to solve the Problem of Universals, but to clarify its nature by answering these questions. Indeed answers to those questions will give us an answer to the more general question, “What is the Problem of Universals?”. This article is thus concerned with a rarely discussed, fundamental and basic question, since only after we are clear about the nature of the problem should we look for a solution to it. As we shall see in §2, a natural understanding of the Problem of Universals is as the problem of the One over Many. This understanding or formulation of the problem, however, is unsatisfactory since it is compatible with different answers to our questions about the explananda and the sort of explanation or account one should give of those explananda. In §3 I shall say what those different answers are and I shall argue that a solution to the Problem of Universals must account for the truthmakers of certain truths (as opposed to their ontological commitments or their conceptual contents), namely for the truthmakers of whatever truths are the explananda of a solution to the Problem of Universals. In §4 I shall present some fairly uncontroversial results of Truthmaker Theory. These results will be used in §5 to show what are the explananda of a solution to the Problem of Universals. This will provide a different understanding of the nature of the Problem of Universals, according to which, as argued in §6, it should be thought of as the Many over One