Extrinsic/Intrinsic

Intrinsic/Extrinsic
Author(s): I. L. Humberstone
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Synthese, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Aug., 1996), pp. 205-267
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20117542 .
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I. L. HUMBERSTONE
INTRINSIC/EXTRINSIC
ABSTRACT. Several intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions amongst properties, current in the liter

ature, are discussed and contrasted. The proponents of such distinctions tend to present them
as competing, but it is suggested here that at least three of the relevant distinctions (including
here that between non-relational and relational properties) arise out of separate perfectly
legitimate intuitive considerations: though of course different proposed explications of the
informal distinctions involved in any one case may well conflict. Special attention is paid
to the question of whether a single notion of property is capable of supporting the various
distinctions.
1. INTRODUCTION
What follows is a study of three distinctions which have been marked using
the terminology of intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties. The first, reviewed in
Section 2, is the distinction (as we shall put matters) between non-relational
and relational properties. The most natural way of explicating this distinc
tion turns out to render the label 'extrinsic' somewhat inappropriate for the
relational properties, as we shall find after pursuing the distinction, amongst
relational properties, between what have been calledpure and impure such
properties. The remaining two distinctions have a better claim on the intrin
sic/extrinsic terminology. One of these is the distinction between properties
which are 'purely qualitative' and those which are not; notions of intrin
sicness falling under this general heading have been explored by Jaegwon
Kim and David Lewis, and we present them in Section 3. Finally, there is
another notion of intrinsicness (with a correlative notion of extrinsicness)
emphasized by G. E. Moore and recently revived by J. M. Dunn, which
we shall discuss under the name 'interiority' in Section 4. A concluding
section, Section 5, contrasts these distinctions, in particular in respect of
what is most suitably understood by talk of properties in each case, for
the distinction in question to count as a distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic properties.
The three distinctions just alluded to do not exhaust those towhich the
intrinsic/extrinsic terminology has in the past been applied. For example,
some writers have just used these terms to mark the contrast between essen
tial and accidental properties. Examples of this ill-advised use of 'intrinsic'
Synthese 108: 205-267, 1996.

? 1996Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in theNetherlands.
206 I. L. HUMBERSTONE
to mean 'essential' are given in Dunn 1990b, and we will not consider it
further beyond noting here that for each of the notions of intrinsicness to
be considered, being intrinsic is neither necessary nor sufficient for being
essential. A more deserving employment of the distinction is to be found in
recent work Brian While for most ?
by Ellis.1 philosophers, Ellis remarks
and this is certainly so on the account provided by Lewis, discussed in Sec
tion 3 below? shape is an intrinsic property, we should not count the shape
of a stretched rubber band as intrinsic to it, since it does not have this shape
independently of the external forces acting on it. The Ellis-intrinsic proper

ties of objects are those properties they would possess in the absence of the
causal influence of such external forces. Though we shall have occasion, at
the end of Section 3, to attend briefly to another causal/nomological notion
of intrinsicness (there called Kim+ -intrinsicness), we will have nothing
?
further beyond a remark in the following paragraph (and one in note 34)
?
to say about Ellis-intrinsicness.
There is one general point which can usefully be made before we pro
ceed further, suggested indeed by the idea of essential properties. There are
two ways one could approach the essential/accidental distinction, which we
may call 'local' and 'global'. The local approach to essentiality consists in
asking what it is for an arbitrary object to have a property essentially, while

the global approach asks instead what it takes for a property (not thought
of as possessed by this rather than that individual) to be an essential prop
erty. Thus essentiality on the global approach is a property of properties,
tout court, whereas essentiality on the local approach is a relation between
properties and individuals. Having adopted a global approach, one may
well try to apply its results to obtain, derivatively, the local notion, or vice
versa. To shift to the case of intrinsicness, one has also the global notion
of P's being an intrinsic property tout court (an idea with considerably
better prospects than in the case of essentiality) as well as the local notion
of P's being an intrinsic property of a. Though we mostly concentrate
in Sections 3 and 4 on global notions of intrinsicness, there will be some
attention paid, when appropriate, to their local analogues. It is by no means
to be assumed that, armed with the global notion, one could simply say that
an individual has property P intrinsically when P is an intrinsic property
possessed by a. In Section 3, we shall have occasion to observe that David

Lewis' duplication-based notion of (global) intrinsicness lends itself to the
isolation of a corresponding local notion which can relate a property to an
individual even when the property in question is not intrinsic tout court.
In this case, P will at least be a property possessed by a, though even this
much should not be assumed to hold of every local notion of intrinsicness;
for example, that provided by Ellis (1991) has it that the intrinsic shape
INTRINSIC/EXTRINSIC 207
of a given object may never be the actual shape of that object, since the
object in question is never outside the influence of shape-distorting forces
(as Ellis remarks). Clearly, in the case of local intrinsicness notions like
this, the formulation 'a has the property P intrinsically' would be highly
?
misleading though 'a is intrinsically such as to possess property P' is
considerably less so.
Since we shall not be stressing the applications of the distinctions
under investigation in what follows, we collect here some reminders as
to the kind of work philosophers have called upon intrinsic/extrinsic (and
also pure/impure) contrasts to perform. Many supervenience theses involve
taking intrinsic properties (in some sense) as the subvenient class; exam
ples may be found inKim (1982a) and Lewis (1983b). Intrinsicness has
also been appealed to in trying to spell out what the uniformity of nature
might be held to amount to so as to save inductive inference from diffi
culties involving 'cooked up' properties (Slote 1967, Schlesinger 1990).
Attempts to give non-trivial formulations of the principle of the Identity
of Indiscernibles have involved both a relational/non-relational distinc
tion and the associated pure/impure division of the relational side thereof;
though we draw extensively on the characterizations of these distinctions
inKhamara (1988), we will not touch on their application to this issue, the
main theme ofthat paper. The significance of the pure/impure contrast for
the precise formulation of some traditional metaphysical theses is stressed
in Fine (1977), and, for the formulation of doctrines of universalizabili
ty in ethics (formoral principles) and philosophy of science (for natural

laws), in Rabinowicz (1979). Finally, we recall Geach's idea of a 'merely
Cambridge change', which one might hope to clarify with the aid of an
intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. We devote the remainder of this introduction
to this, since the issue will come up again, briefly in Section 4, and it is
worth explaining how the most obvious way of making such an application
of the notion of intrinsicness fails.
In the terminology of Geach(1969, p. 71f.), a Cambridge change befalls
an individual x when a predicate formerly false of x comes to be true of x
- -
(or though this is a redundant addition vice versa). Such a Cambridge
change may or may not reflect a genuine or 'real' change undergone by x;

if not, it is called a 'merely Cambridge change' in x. A much discussed
example (e.g., Kim 1974) involves the contrast between Socrates' dying
- a - a widow,
genuine change for Socrates and Xanthippe's becoming
a merely Cambridge change (though doubtless with many 'real' effects)
for Xanthippe. Now a reasonable hunch as to what marks out the genuine
changes from all the Cambridge changes is that the predicate formerly
true and now false of the subject in question should be a predicate which
stands for an intrinsic

property. One of the original examples considered
by Geach, however, shows that this is not after all a promising thought: that
of its coming to be that a is taller than b.When this comes about because
a increases in height, we have a real change in a, but when it comes about
because b shrinks, we have a merely Cambridge change in a (and a real
change in b). But the predicate in question, which comes to be true of a
namely '_ is taller than ?>' is the same in both cases; therefore we cannot
use any kind of intrinsic/extrinsic classification of properties expressed by
predicates in order to say that genuine change is reported by sentences
attributing the acquisition of, specifically, intrinsic properties.

Although the above simple-minded attempt to explicate the genuine vs.
'merely Cambridge' change distinction in terms of an intrinsic/extrinsic
distinction fails, it is possible that some subtler invocation of the distinction
will be of assistance.In particular, in the case of a's coming to be taller
than b, we can say that the relation (taller than) which comes to hold
between them is 'reducible' in the sense that there are intrinsic properties
(namely, particular height-properties) of a and b taken separately, their

respective possession of which entails that the relation holds between them
(in the order cited).2 Then a more
promising way of saying what makes the
envisaged change a genuine change in a, in the case in which a outgrows

- an ?
6, is that a' s change in height intrinsic property is what underlies
(in the sense of the above entailment) a's change in respect of the property
(extrinsic by any reckoning) of being taller than b? Thus, the failure of the
intrinsic/extrinsic distinction to explicate Geach's distinction in the manner
of the preceding paragraph notwithstanding, itmay yet be of service in such
an explication if somewhat differently brought to bear.4
In what follows, we will ignore time and change as far as possible, so as
to avoid getting entangled in the debate over three-dimensional continuants
vs. four-dimensional objects with temporal parts. This means that examples
involving an object's having a property should be understood as an object's
having a property at some (unspecified but fixed) time, or of some temporal

stage of that object's having the property, according to preference. For
an example of how taking sides in that debate can influence views in the
intrinsic/extrinsic arena, consider Slote's claim (1967, p. 129n.) concerning
a certain notion of extrinsicness which he calls non-differentiality (see note
34 below) that the property of having existed for less than a year is extrinsic
but not relational. The property in question, for the temporal parts theorist,
is as intrinsic as a property of spatial extent would be, on the assumption
that the bearer of the property is temporally extended. On the other hand,
if the bearer of the property is taken to be a temporal slice (so that the
attribution of the property is not taken as literally correct), then its having
the property is extrinsic, but is no longer non-relational (since the stage in

question must be appropriately related to earlier stages). Thus the example
? a nor ? on
of property neither intrinsic relational only works with the
assumption that a controversial question about persistence through time
is answered a particular way. (On the account to be developed below,
the contrast between relationality and extrinsicness is mismatched from
the outset, since these are features of properties on two different ways of
taking the term 'property': though some reconciliation with this 'mixed'
way of speaking will be offered in Section 5.) Rather than take sides, we
prefer to skirt these issues here.

Geach's own question, as towhat account is to be given of the difference
between genuine and 'merely Cambridge' change, incidentally, itself has
a non-temporal analogue, which we briefly describe here. To arrive at a
modal version of Geach's distinction, let a Cambridge contingency for an
object x be deemed to arise whenever some predicate true of x might not

have been; now a 'merely Cambridge' contingency arises when this fact
does not reflect some genuine respect inwhich x might have been different.
We can illustrate this with an example which has become hackneyed in
the service of making a somewhat different point, namely the contingent
possession by the number nine of the property of being the number of

solar planets that there are. This reflects a genuine contingency in the solar
system, in that things would have been different with that system had an
extra planet (say) orbited the sun, but a 'merely Cambridge' contingency
for the number 9, in the same way that a's outgrowing b reflects a genuine
change in a, while, ft's being outgrown by a reflects a merely Cambridge

change in b.
By contrast with the example just considered, we shall inwhat follows
not pay much attention to the application of intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions
to properties of non-contingent objects such as numbers, though we shall
have occasion (especially in Section 2) to consider their role as relata
making for relational properties in the other relatum of a binary relation.
2. RELATIONALPROPERTIES
As intimated in our Introduction, some writers tend to oppose relational
properties and intrinsic properties, perhaps even calling the former 'extrin
sic', and it is convenient to begin with a discussion of this idea of a
property's being relational. To get our bearings in the area of relational

and non-relational properties, we draw on the valuable discussion of these
matters which has been provided by E. J. Khamara. Section 3 of Khamara
(1988) tidies up some proposals of Loux (1978), and offers a pair of defin
itions designed to capture the (relatively) informal notions of a pure and an

impure relational property; for simplicity, the relation 'in the background'
is taken to be binary.
DEFINITION 1.P is apositive relational property iff, for any individual

x, x's having P consists in rr's having a certain relation to at least one
individual y.
DEFINITION 2. A property P is impure iff there is at least one individual

y such that, for any individual x, x's having the property P consists in x's
having a certain relation to y.
Thus, to use one of Khamara's examples, the property of being married to

Queen Elizabeth II is an impure property, whereas the property of being
married to someone is a positive relational property. There is something
potentially obscure about the way the phrase 'a certain relation' figures in
these definitions. This is naturally read as an existential
quantifier with wide
scope, and so, to force this reading (thus eliminating any risk of confusion)
let us reformulate the definitions using standard quantifier notation. This
makes the structural relationship between the two notions being defined
clearer all round. As a temporary simplification, we also replace the mate
rial about 'consisting in' by a connective for equivalence (4<V), but be
warned that there is a problem, noticed by T. E. Karmo, about giving this
its most obvious reading (as 'strict equivalence', so that A <B> B is under
stood as 'Necessarily, A iff B'; in fact, until Section 4, very little will hang
on the difference between such a reading, and the reading 'It is a priori
knowable that A iff B'.). Khamara mentions this problem (p. 146) apropos
of a definition suggested by Loux, and we will return to it in due course.
These changes convert Definitions 1 and 2 into:
DEFINITION 1' P is a positive relational property iff 3RVx(Px <->

3y(Rxy))
DEFINITION 2' P is impure iff 3R3yVx(Px <->
Rxy)
(Read 'Px' as 'x has the property P' and 'Rxy' as 'x stands in the (binary)
relation R toy'.)
The difference between the two notions being defined corresponds,
then, to a difference in the positioning of the existential quantifier '3y\
We can see what this difference comes to in the case of the example
already mentioned. The property of being married, alias the property of
being married to someone, is a positive relational property by Definition 1'
because there is a relation R (namely the relation of being married to) such
that for any individual x, x has the property in question iff there is some y
(not necessarily the same y for different choices of #) such that x ismarried
to y. On the other hand, the property of being married to Queen Elizabeth is
an impure property by Definition 2', because there is some relation R (the
relation of being married to, again) and there is some individual y (namely
QEII) such that for any x, x has the property in question iff # is married to
'
y. This time, because the existentially quantified variable 'y comes before
comment ?
the universally quantified variable 'rr', the parenthetical above
-
"not necessarily the same y for different choices of #" most emphatically
does not apply: there must be at least one y such that whichever x you
choose, x has P iff x bears R to that y.
These last comments about the relative
scope of the existential and uni
versal quantifiers may suggest route an easy
to showing something which
we might well expect to be demonstrable, namely: that every impure prop
erty is a positive relational property. (More specifically, that every impure
property in the sense of Definition 2f is a positive relational property.)
We might be led to this conclusion by thinking of the fact that a claim
of the form 3yVxA entails the corresponding claim Vx3yA (though not
? - we
conversely): then the thought would be just use this entailment to
show that for a given P, (1) entails (2)
(1) 3yix{Px <+Rxy)

(2) \/x{Px <->3y(Rxy))
But is a problem here: (1) and (2) are not respectively

there of the forms
'
3yixA and Vx3yA. This would not matter if the '<-> in (1) and (2) were a
one-way implication '?> '; so adjusted (1) would entail (2). But, as written,
-
(1) does not entail (2) in effect because of the (as we might put it) '??'
component in the '<h-'.5
We might ask if there is a simple definition of'relational property' which

subsumes both the positive relational properties and the impure properties
(since we have just seen that the notion of a positive relational property
does notitself do this). Well, something both classes have in common is
that whenever something has a property P in either of these classes there
?
is a relation R such that Mx(Px 3y(Rxy)). In other words, we weaken
the earlier '?->>'to a '-?'. Clearly if P is a positive relational property, P
satisfies this condition; likewise ifP is an impure property. Probably the
'
'?> here should be read as strict implication (i.e., the necessitation of the
corresponding material implication). However, the above is a very weak
condition on P, being satisfied by any necessarily unpossessable property,
and indeed by every property whatever, ifwe consider (and why shouldn't
we?) R as the identity relation =. A second way of subsuming both positive

relational properties and impure properties is the cheap-and-easy device of
simply disjoining the r.h.s.'s of Definitions 1' and 2'. But this very clearly
fails to bring out what lies behind intuitive idea of a relational property
-
which is to say: the idea of a property which somehow 'involves' a
relation.
We can approach the notion of 'involvement' at issue here by consider
ing various ways of, as we shall put it, obtaining relational properties from
binary relations.
Suppose we have a binary relation R. (In the interests of informality,
we ? ?
shall deliberately but only temporarily 'confuse' binary relations
and the dyadic predicate symbols which stand for them.) Then there are
- or
three basic ways three basic types of way, if you prefer- of obtaining
relational properties from them, to be called: quantification, reflexivization,
and place-fixing. 'Basic' here means no more than: commonly encountered
and amenable to especially simple description.
First, quantification. Since we are considering binary relations, there
are two positions into which we can quantify; there are also two (standard)
types of quantification we can employ: universal and existential. This gives
four relational properties we may obtain from our relation R; there is the
property of bearing R to something, there is the property of being P'd by
everything, and so on. (One could also consider various modes of 'non
? etc. ? to say nothing
standard' numerical, plurality, quantification; of
'negative' standard quantifiers, such as 'for no x\) The relational prop

erties obtained in any of the four ways explicitly indicated here might
naturally be described as positive relational properties obtained from R

by quantification. Thus Khamara's 'positive relational properties', given
by Definition 1', are what from the point of view of this broader taxon
omy would be called 'positive existential relational properties'. (There is
indeed a general tendency in the philosophical literature to concentrate on
the existential rather than the universal case.)
The second obvious kind of way inwhich we may turn a (binary) relation
into a relational property is by 'identificationof arguments', or, as we shall
say for brevity, by reflexivization. The property obtained from R by this
method is the property of P-ing oneself. Relational properties obtained by
this method appear not to correspond to anything inKhamara's discussion,
and doubts may be raised as to whether it merits inclusion on our list
at all. We already observed
have that one conspicuous feature shared by
Khamara's pure and impure relational properties is that for any property P
of either of these types, there is a relation R such that \/x (Px -? 3y(Rxy)).
This feature is shared by our reflexivized relational properties, and so we
seem here to have a point in favour of classifying them as relational. As

a point against so classifying them, it might be held that a more natural
feature to have required of positive and impure relational properties P is
that they satisfy, for some R:
Mx(Px -> 3y(y / x&Rxy))6
and of course it does not in general follow from the fact that an object bears
the relation R to itself that it bears that relation to something else. So this
modification would not allow us to group the 'reflexivization' derived rela
tional properties with the others. However, since such a condition would
block a perfectly reasonable way of deriving a property from a binary
relation, and we are thinking of such derivability as explicating the idea of
a property's 'involving' such a relation, it is best to think of the intrusion
of non-identity here as confusing the relationality of a property with the
extrinsicness of a property: see the discussion of notions of extrinsicness
in Sections 3 and 4 below (in which non-identity is replaced by something
even stronger, namely mereological disjointness). Further, imposing such
a condition would even exclude the paradigm case of positive existen
tial relational properties, except in the case of irreflexive relations, since
the property of shaving someone (for example) is possessed no less by
the self-shaver than by the bearded barber.7 Consider also the other ways
of obtaining properties from relations by quantification, which yield, for
example, the property of admiring at most three individuals. Does posses

? -
sion of this surely on any intuitive understanding, relational property
entail standing in some relation (the same relation for all possessors of
the property) to at least one individual distinct from the possessor? What
relation? (Certainly not: admiring. What about: not admiring? Again the
answer is negative.)
Thirdly, we can turn a binary relation into a relational property by
picking an object and filling up either the first, or the second, position
by (a name of) this object. Say we have only the individuals a\,..., an
Then there are In possible relational properties which can be
altogether.
obtained by this 'place-fixing' procedure: we have the property of being
P-ed by a\ and that of P-ing a\, the property of being P'd by ai etc.
The relational properties so obtained are the impure relational properties
of Khamara's discussion.
Now, what exactly have we been (far from exhaustively) classifying
here? The most obvious answer to this question is that we have been exam
ining ways of obtaining one-place predicates from two-place predicates,

where an n-place predicate is understood in the broadest way to include
'structured (or 'complex') predicates': open formulas in n free variables.
We have listed three different

types of way of obtaining from Rxy one
-
place complex predicates (in this sense). Quantification replaces to take
the case of existential quantification in the second position ?the two place
Rxy by the one-place 3y(Rxy); reflexivization replaces Rxy by Rxx;
place-fixing (in the second position, by way of example) Rxy by Rxa, for
some constant a.
If the most obvious characterization of what we
have been busy classi
fying is: ways of obtaining one-place predicates from two-place predicates,
then by what right have we been describing it as a classification of ways
of obtaining (relational) properties from binary relations? One point at
which to start a justification of this description iswith the observation that
we have been following Khamara in understanding 'property' in the most
generous way, according to which
every (one-place) predicate determines
a
property.8 The fact that every one-place (simple or complex) predicate
determines a property ? so that, for example, corresponding to the predi
cate 'is either a dog or the owner of a fish purchased by Barbara Bush', we
have the property of being either a dog or the owner of a fish purchased
by Barbara Bush?still doesn't tell us exactly how tomodulate effortlessly
between talk of properties and talk of predicates. One thing we haven't yet
been told is when two predicates have the same property corresponding to
them. Here various answers are possible, and that which ismost natural in
the present context will emerge as a result of the examination of what we
call Karmo s problem, the moment,
below. For it will suffice to indicate
that the individuation policy we
for the present discussion
need is very
much at the 'fine-grained' end of the spectrum of possible individuation
we will not be thinking of the property of being an x
procedures.9 While
such that 3y(Rxy), obtained from the relation R by existential quantifi
cation in the second position as a different property from that of being an
x such that 3z(Rxz), even though the (complex) predicates here are dif
ferent, we will not end up counting arbitrary pairs of a priori coextensive
predicates as expressing the same property. (In the instance just cited their
a priori coextensiveness takes the special form of logical equivalence.)
We return to this issue at the end of the present section, and more fully in
Section 5.
Itwill now be quite clear how far from complete our list of three 'basic'
ways of obtaining relational properties from binary relations is.What, for
about the property of bearing R to something that bears R to
example,
or ? one to in variable
itself, the property this harder express colloquial
free English, so we resort to the more formal idiom ?which any individual
x possesses iff for some y, both Rxy and Ryxl Here it is taken for granted
that we have agreed on what itwould be for something to be a relational
property in terms of R, and that what we have inmind is a property

defined
corresponding to a complex one-place predicate built up from variables,
the relation-symbol 'R\ and various logical devices. There is a vagueness
here about what is allowed under the heading of 'various logical devices'.
If we allow (aside from individual variables) as logical vocabulary the
quantifiers and truth-functional connectives, as well as individual constants
(for place-fixing), we in effect are resolving the vagueness noted above in
'various logical devices' in favour of the following precisification: first
order logical devices (without identity). One could alternatively resolve
in favour of: first-order logical devices (with identity). This allows in
such relational properties as 'bearing R to something other than oneself
(more formally, the property of being an x such that 3y(Rxy&x ^ y)
and such derived binary relations as that holding between x and y when
\/z(Rxz -? z ? y): in English, when x bears R to at most y. Thirdly,
one could also allow higher-order logical devices, in which case we have
as a relation obtainable on the basis of R the ancestral of R (the smallest
transitive reflexive relation including R). Finally, one could make specific
the logical devices by including (e.g. alongside those characterized above as
first-order) numerous 'intensional' constructions, such as modal operators
and counterfactual conditionals.
Now that we have abandoned the attempt to list amanageable handful of
devices for
'obtaining relational
properties from relations' and settled for
allowing relational properties to correspond to arbitrary open formulas in
which some relational predicate appears, we have reached a suitable point
at which to abandon also the fiction that only dyadic predicates need to
be considered in this connexion. Even in the case of the devices explicitly
listed earlier, this is transparent: reflexivization
might, for example, lead
us to identify of an unstructured
all three arguments triadic predicate. For
an example of how this bears on the notion of impurity, consider, for some
binary relation R the?surely we want to say? impure relational property of
bearing R to at least one of two individuals a and b. There is no individual

such that to have this property is to stand in the relation R to that individual,
so Definitions 2 and 2' will not help us. There is, however, the complex
tetradic predicate
Rxy V Rwz
from which we can obtain

the desired monadic open formula by place
fixing y and z to a and b, respectively, and identifying the arguments x
and w.10 We also need to observe that there is no reason to have used
the same binary predicate R twice over in the above complex predicate:
we could have chosen another one - S, say, and considered ringing the
same changes on Rxy V Swz. Similarly, other predicates of any arity may
figure in the derivation of a one-place from amany-place open formula. For
example, and without suggesting that counterfactual definitions are in the
final analysis appropriate for dispositional predicates, consider obtaining
(a predicate expressing) the property of being water-soluble, as applied to
an arbitrary individual x, from the complex predicate 'if x were immersed
inwater then x would dissolve'. The binary predicate relation 'is immersed
in' here is joined by the singulary 'dissolves', and if we needed to make
this explicit we could describe ourselves as obtaining the given relational
property from the relation of immersion together with the property of
dissolving ('with the aid of the counterfactual conditional construction'
? to we
be even more explicit).11 Finally, should acknowledge that the
descent from more-than-monadic to monadic predicates is really a pattern
that occurs again at all the higher adicities, so that a full discussion would
include 'obtaining binary relations from ternary relations' and so on. In
the question of purity vs impurity arises here again. Thus if
particular,
we consider the triadic predicate 'x sells y to z9 and place-fix z to Queen
Elizabeth II, we end up with a dyadic predicate which expresses an impure
binary relation (to adopt a natural extension of the 'purity' terminology);
obviously if such relations are allowed to instantiate the variable 'P' in

Definition 1', we will have buried the impurity from view, and will be
led wrongly to conclude that the property of selling something to QEII
is a pure relational property. This shows that for the right-hand side of
either Definition 2 or Definition 2' to suffice for picking out the impure
relational properties?and similarly with our later characterization in terms
? some
of place-fixing as-yet-unspecified restriction on the variable 'P' to
pure binary relations is actually needed.12 Setting aside such intractable
difficulties, we pass to a matter of greater interest for what follows.
It is time now to see why the passage from the 'consists in' terminology
of Khamara's Definition 2 to the (strict) biconditional formulation of Def
inition 2! as a definition of an impurity is an oversimplification with which
we cannot continue to live. The 'consists in' formulation has the advantage
? as we
of avoiding a certain type of counterintuitive result of avoiding,
shall say, Karmo 'sproblem (see Khamara's note 17), but it has the disad
vantage of introducing a locution of which we have at present no articulated
understanding: what exactly is it, anyway, for possessing such-and-such
property to consist in standing in so-and-so relation to some specified

individual (impure case) or to some individual or other (pure 'existential'
case)? The remainder of the present section looks at Karmo's problem and
variations thereon, considers some not very promising attempts to avoid
? seems
it, and finally saying something about what to lie behind this
'consisting in' talk?^offers a more promising solution.
According to Definition 21, a property P is impure iff for some relation
R the following is the case: 3yixU(Px ?-? Rxy). Here we have inserted
a WD' ('Necessarily') to make clear the intended 'strict' reading of the
biconditional. One may prefer to have this 'D' placed before, rather than
after, the 'V#', but we will not worry about the issues involved here.
(Some may even want a 'D' both before and after the universal quantifier.)
Khamara puts Karmo's objection to this suggested definition like this:
... there is an omniscient
suppose being, God, who necessarily knows everything; and
take any pure property, such as the intrinsic property of being green. Then, necessarily, x
is green if and only if x is known by God to be green; so that (by [the proposed definition])
being green is an impure relational property. Thus, ifwe abide by [the proposed definition],
the existence of an omniscient being would render all properties impure. But this result
would not accrue ifwe abide by Definition 2; for we would not say that #'s being green
consists inGod's knowing that x is green (Khamara 1988, p. 146)
Before proceeding, we should note some minor grounds for concern

over the above formulation:
(i) In the first place, observe that by 'omniscient', what Khamara really
has in mind here is 'essentially omniscient'. But, further, a being can
be essentially omniscient without existing necessarily; in possible worlds
terms, this is just the point that a being might have the property of being
omniscient in all those worlds in which it exists, without existing in every
world. So the supposition with which Khamara really needs to begin is
that God exists necessarily and is essentially omniscient. This of course
is a strong supposition, and one might not be prepared to go along with
it. (For example, one might not believe that anything could be essentially
omniscient.) A Karmo-like example will be given below which avoids this
feature.
(ii) Another contentious aspect of the present example is the assumption

that 'is known by God to be green' picks out a property. There are actually
several issues here, which we won't go into at any length. It should be
mentioned that many philosophers think there are two ways of construing
'a knows b to have property P\ade dicto construal, perspicuously rendered
'a knows that b has property P', and a de re construal, perspicuously
rendered 'a knows
of b, that it has property P'. Roughly, on the former
construal, the replacement of '6' by a co-referential term is not guaranteed,
whereas on the latter, it is guaranteed, to result in a knowledge-attribution
with as the original. Thus only the latter legitimately
the same truth-value
gives rise to a property-expressing predicate when the '6' is replaced by

a variable, or omitted, as in Khamara's form 'is known by God to have
property P'. One might hold that, where '&' and '&" are co-referential, the
only way for a difference in truth-value to emerge between 'a knows that b
has P' and 'a knows that b' has P, is for a to be ignorant of the truth of the
identity-statement 'ft= b'\ But this cannot happen, itwill be further held,
if a is God, since this would contradict the assumption of omniscience.13
Another possibility that comes to mind here is to distinguish between
de dicto and de re omniscience, and, having introduced the latter notion
appropriately (the familiar notion of omniscience being of the former type),
build in the assumption that God is omniscient in the de re sense. Plainly, it
would be preferable to have an example of where Definition 2' goes wrong
which does not us in all these complications.
involve
(///) Lastly, one may well wonder at the appropriateness of Khamara's
choice of the property of being green as a pure non-relational property. The
complication here is of course the doctrine
of secondary qualities. Arguably
to be green just is to be such as to appear a certain way to (normal) perceivers
under certain ('standard') conditions. On one popular explication of such
a dispositional - as
account in the case of water-solubility mentioned
?
above the 'such as to appear' becomes a counterfactual construction
('would appear to normal perceivers if viewed under suitable conditions')
which puts us into the domain of (pure) relational properties. However, this
is really irrelevant to the the example, since we could equally well have
chosen any uncontroversially non-relational property in place of greenness,
and run through the argument with respect to it instead.
It may helpto have another example to hand, free of some of the
complications raised by Karmo's 'omniscient God' example (though it does

have a few complications of its own). We will discuss the general problem
by reference to both examples. For this second example (of difficulties

for the 'strict biconditional' accounts of pure and impure relationality) we
begin by introducing a dyadic predicate symbol, and then go on to define
a one-place predicate in terms of it. The definition will make the property
expressed by the latter predicate an impure relational property according to
Definition 2'. To introduce our dyadic predicate, we need to have available
something agreed to be a non-relational property. In Khamara's case, this
was taken as the property of being green, but as we saw, this is a potentially
controversial case, so let us choose instead the property of being made of
tin (i.e., being composed of tin). Now let us introduce our new predicate
Tinthrees by the definition:
Vxiy(x Tinthrees y ?-? (x ismade of tin& y is the number 3))
Since this is intended as a definition, we take it to be both necessarily true

and also knowable a priori. Now let us ask whether, according to Definition
2!, which says a property is an impure property iff there is some relation
P and some individual y such that necessarily, anything has the property
in question that relation to y, the property of being made of tin
iff it bears
counts as impure. Well there is a relation, namely the Tinthree relation, and
there is an individual, namely the number 3, such that necessarily, anything
is made of tin iff it stands in this relation to this object. So being made of
tin turns out, by Definition 2!, to be an impure property: but this shows that
something is wrong with Definition 2!, because we selected the property
of being made of tin in the first place on the grounds that it was a clear
example of a non-relational property.

Two reactions come to mind, aside from the reaction ? to be explored
-
and endorsed, below that we should move to talk of 'consisting in'. One
is that there is something 'fishy' about the relation of Tinthree-ing; the
second is that it is the special nature of the second relatum (the number
3) of this relation: in particular, that this is a 'necessary existent'. We can
introduce the first reaction by noting that a variant on point (ii) above
concerning Khamara's discussion would be that there is no such binary
relation as 'being known to be green by', because of the referential opacity
induced by propositional attitude constructions. Impressionistically, one
might say that this gives the phrase quoted too much complexity for it
to stand for a binary relation, while the fishiness in the present instance
is that our would-be binary relation has too little complexity to qualify:
our definition of this relation just takes a conjunction with one conjunct
involving x and the other involving y. This is fishy because we don't end
up with a 'genuinely relational' relation.
Elaborating this first reaction, let us call a binary relation R 8i-represent
able if there are monadic (but not necessarily unstructured) predicates F
and G such that for al\x,y,x bears R to y iffFx & Gy The Tinthree relation
is &-representable, taking F as 'is made of tin', and G as 'is the number
3'. The &-representable relations may well strike us as only spuriously
relational: after all, to determine whether such a relation holds between x
and y, it suffices to know that x satisfies some condition formulable without
reference to y, and that y satisfies some condition formulable without
reference to x. (An uncharitable though not wildly unnatural interpretation
of Leibniz's doctrine of the reducibility of relations would be as the claim
that every binary relation is &-representable.14)
So, a possible to the Tinthree example might be that this does
reaction
not express a genuine relation, because of its &-representability, and so is
not a 'proper' instantiation of the variable 'P' in Definition 2!. An impure
property, according to this reaction, might better be defined as one for
which we can find a genuinely relational binary relation R and an object
y such that necessarily, anything has the property iff it bears R to y. We
shall not explore this reaction further here, beyond noting that as well
as excluding the &-representable relations as not 'genuinely relational',
someone interested in taking this line would presumably wish to exclude
all cases of #-representable relations, for # any binary truth-functional
connective. (In fact, all are excluded if we concentrate on the three cases
of # = &,# = V, and # = <- , this last being material equivalence here: see
the reference in the preceding note.)
We introduce the second reaction to the Tinthree example by recalling
the comment numbered (/) on Khamara's presentation of Karmo's problem,
which noted, inter alia, the need for God to be assumed to exist necessarily.
It is for a parallel reason that the number 3 is chosen to play the role of
the mysteriously impurifying individual in the Tinthree
example. This is
less controversially a thing which
could not but exist, than God is. On the
other hand, being an abstract entity, there are some problematic aspects
to its standing in any ('genuine') relations to concrete particulars.15 For
example, it is sometimes said that for an object to possess (at some time)
a temperature of 60? Celsius is for that object to stand in the relation
temperature-in-degrees-Celsius to the number 60. But Crane (1990, p.

227) objects:
We should all agree that having (e.g.) a temperature is not a real relation to a number:
it is a non-relational or intrinsic property. The reason we can
represent it as a relation
is
that all temperatures belong to a family of intrinsicproperties (...) Once we have decided
on a unit of measurement, say centigrade, we may pick out each property in the family
of temperatures with a two-place predicate 'x has a temperature in centigrade of n' true
of pairs of objects and numbers. But these are just ways we have of picking out the non
?
relational properties in the family the fact that we can do this does not, on its own, show
that there is a real relation of temperature-in-degrees-centigrade that an object has to a
number.
This interesting (the conflation

passage of intrinsicness with non
relationality notwithstanding) does not suggest a concrete particular is
never genuinely related to a number: only that there is no such relation
involved when we give the measure of some magnitude in terms of a num
ber on some (arbitrary) scale. In this case, we are to think of the numbers as
merely indexing the determinate physical properties, which Crane wants
us to regard as non-relational properties. Rather different from such cases
would be that inwhich we say that Jones has 4 children, which could be put
by saying that Jones stands in the relation Number-of children to the num
ber 4. Here the idea of indexing in terms of some arbitrary scale does not
seem appropriate. So the question becomes: is bearing the Tinthree relation
to a number like bearing the Number-of children relation to a number, or is
it like bearing the (would-be) temperature-in-degrees-centigrade relation
to a number?16
Such questions aside, itwill be clear from the discussion of 'internal'

properties in Section 3 below, that there can be ample justification for
making a special exception in the case of non-contingently existing objects,
and itmay be tempting to exclude them here. This is done in Rosenkrantz
(1979), where definition of impurity is offered which would block both
the Tinthree example, and Karmo's original example, because he requires
(roughly) that the 'y' in 3y\/x?(Px ?-?Rxy) be restricted to contingently
existing individuals.
The reason we do not follow up the two reactions here summarised is
that they concern features of the examples adduced to show that there is
trouble for a certain account of impurity for relational properties, whereas
other examples strongly reminiscent of Karmo's problem would escape
-
the kinds of restrictions banning &-representable relations and non
- to
contingent objects and would survive threaten the very notion of
a relational property itself. For instance, consider the dyadic complex
predicate:
x is made of the same material as y & y is made of tin
Though conjunctive, this condition on x and y does not render the

relation holding between them &-representable since both variables occur
ineliminably in the first conjunct. (Nor is there any intrusion of non
contingenty existing objects.) Now derive a relational property (as that
expressed by the monadic complex predicate obtained) by existential quan
tificationin the second ('y') position. This is the property of being made of
the same material as something made of tin: but this property is necessarily
and a priori coextensive with the property of being made of tin.17 Accord
ing to Definition 1', P is a positive (existential) relational property just in
case there is some relation R such that necessarily
\/x(Px^3y(Rxy)).
Taking 'Px' as of tin', then, and 'Rxy' as the predicate
'x is made inset
above, we have by Definition 1', that being made of tin is a positive rela
tional property, whereas this was chosen precisely as an example of a
non-relational property. The same response that we shall now examine to
the original problem forDefinition 2! as a definition of impuritywill solve
this problem forDefinition 1'; the passage toDefinition 2 andDefinition 1
will be vindicated in the same way.
Recall that the crucial aspect of this passage lay in the replacement of
a modalized biconditional by a locution to the effect that having a certain
?
property consisted a condition of some specified form. This
in meeting
- as -
reaction Karmo's own, it happens to what we have been calling
Karmo's problem is that endorsed by Khamara, and it certainly seems
on an intuitive level, not only for the original
satisfactory problem, but also
for the variations we have to consider. The trouble is: can

had occasion
we articulate the intuitions It seems right to say that being green
involved?
does not (even on the assumption of a necessarily existent and essentially
omniscient God) consist in being known by God to be green. It also seems
right to suggest that being made of tin does not consist in bearing the
Tinthree relation to the number 3. Finally, to get away from the impurity
cases, one would hardly consent to the claim that being made of tin consists
in being made of the same material as something made of tin. But what is
going on here?
Let us take the second example first. The relation of Tinthree-ing was
defined to hold between x and y on condition that x was made of tin
and y was the number 3. Forget the peculiar conjunction-of-monadic
predications form of this definition and forget the peculiar role played by
-
the number 3 in the definition the two foci of the reactions considered
above. Just look at the first conjunct: it employs the concept made of tin.
How could the property of being made of tin be introduced in terms of the
relation of Tinthree-ing, when this relation has itself been introduced in
terms of the property of being made of tin? If we think of these successive
introductions as links in a chain of definitions, then we should clearly have a
problem of circularity on our hands. So perhaps the idea of_'s consisting
in ... is the idea of breaking down one concept into its 'constituents': the
original concept had better not appear amongst these very constituents,
or amongst of these constituents,
the constituents if anything like this
mereological metaphor is to be appropriate.
Let us apply this thought to the original example. Being green cannot
consist in being known
by God to be green, because the concept of being
green is 'already part of the concept of being known by God to be green.
According to the present line of thought, then, 'consisting in' is rather like
'consisting of: we need to have available our components before we can
compose them into anything further. But there are many questions.
A first question that will be asked is: whereas before we seemed to be
talking of such things as the property of being green, square, made of tin,
etc., now all of a sudden we are talking about the concept of being green,
?
square, and the rest how come? Secondly, we will naturally wonder as
to how appropriate the mereological metaphor of composition is in the
present context: certainly, if a is a proper part of b, then b is not also a
a -
proper part of but mightn't there be two equally good analyses, one of
the concept F which deploys, in the analysis, the concept G, and another
which analyzes the concept G in terms of the concept P? If we think of
these as potential definitions, then there is only a circularity if we help
ourselves to both; there is nothing pathological if we simply note that
either would be a satisfactory definition by itself. (Terms are frequently

interdefinable in this way.) We will return to the first question in amoment,
after pursuing the second a little further.
The view that there is nothing pathological about the idea of choosing
either to analyse one concept in terms of another, or to analyse the second
in terms of the first, is almostuniversally accepted among those who have
thought about such matters.18 But itmeans that we cannot straightforwardly
endorse the mereological gloss on what is for being_to consist in being
..., since the existence of an analysis of being_in terms of... does not
in general rule out the existence of an analysis of... in terms of_. To get
the needed asymmetry, we should
presumably have to relativize the talk
of 'consisting in' to a particular system of analyses (or definitions). Thus,
given a system of definitions S, we would say that being_consists in
... relative to S iff the the dash can be eliminated
being vocabulary filling
in accordance with the system of definitions S to yield the result filling the
dots.
One
might also consider 'derelativizing' in either of the two ways
described under 'Quantification' above: by universal quantification w.r.t.
S, and by existential quantificaion w.r.t. S. According to the first policy,
we should say that being_consists in being ... iff for every
system
of definitions in being ... relative to
(or analyses) S, being_consists
S. According to the second way we should say that being_consists
in being ... iff for some system of definitions (or analyses) S, being_
consists in being ... relative to S. of illustration, consider the
By way
following (corny) example of interdefinability.19 We have two systems of
definitions, each of which contains only one definition:
(S\) \/x(x is a brother of y <-*(x is a sibling of y & x ismale))

(S2) Vx(x is a sibling of y ?-> (x is a brother of y V x is a sister of y))
Thus, relative to S\, Chris's being a brother of Alf consists in Chris's being
a male sibling of Alf, whereas relative to S2 , this is not so, and what
is true instead is that Chris's being a sibling of Alf consists in Chris's
being either a brother or a sister of Alf. On the first ('universal') way
of dropping the relativity to systems of definitions, it is true neither that
Chris's being a brother of Alf consists in Chris's being a male sibling of
Alf, nor that Chris's being a sibling of Alf consists in Chris's being either
a brother or a sister of Alf. On the second ('existential') way of dropping
the relativization, each 'consists in' statement here considered is true.20
Now the above distinction between existential and universal notions
of 'consisting in' only arises for the case in which there is not a single
preferred system of definitions/analyses for the concepts concerned. We
could consider whether the cases into which our discussion of relational
properties hasled us are of this sort. Above, we asked: How could the
property of being made of tin be introduced in terms of the relation of the
Tinthree-ing, when this relation has itself been introduced in terms of the
property of being made of tin? Now the question is: who says we could
-
not begin with the relation of Tinthree-ing, taken as primitive, and then
-
without any such circularity worries define being made of tin in terms of
-
it?An odd sort of primitive itmight seem to be but can any more be said
about this possibility than that?
Something can: ifwe adopt a particular view of concepts. This will bring
us back the question announced above and left dangling, namely "whereas
before we seemed to be talking of such things as the property of being
green, square, made of tin, etc., now all of a sudden we are talking about
-
the concept of being green, square, and the rest how come?" The view of
concepts we need would hold that some concepts are inherently structured
while others are inherently unstructured. In particular, the concept of being,
for example, either red or green, not only has built into its being that
very concept the fact that it is structured rather than unstructured, but
?
the particular structure it has the particular way it is composed out of
the concepts red and green is likewise part of what makes it that rather
than some other
concept. To return to the above Sibling example, we
could define a certain concept, call it Siblingx in terms of having the same
parents (say), and in terms of this define the concepts Brother and Sister, as
Male Sibling and Female Sibling, respectively, and then, finally, define the
further concept of Siblings as Either Brother or Sister. Now, on the view
in question, Siblingi really is a further concept, not to be confused with
the concept Siblingx : in particular, the former concept is in part composed
out of the latter, and not conversely. It is correct, on this view of matters,
to say that x's being a Sibling2 of y consists in x's being a brother or sister
of y, whereas itwould not be correct to say that x's being a Siblingi of y
consists in rr's being or sister of y: rather, x's being a Sibling of
a brother
y consists in x and y having the same parents.21

How would this leave us with properties and relations? The most obvi
ous option would ?
be to identify properties and relations for present
?
purposes with (appropriate) concepts. The phrase 'for present purposes'
here means: in the interests of having a notion of property to which the
relational/non-relational distinction has non-trivial application. (This does
not imply that this is how we should think of properties in general, as
will become clear in the ensuing sections as we discuss intrinsic/extrinsic
distinctions.) Such an identification slices more finely than any policy
according to which properties for which it was a priori (or, for which
it was necessary, or, for which it was both necessary and a priori) that
they applied to the same things, counted as the same property. The corre
sponding coarser policy for relations would be that relations which, as an

a priori matter, related precisely the same pairs of individuals counted as
the same relation. For this is clearly not so on the present view of concepts.
For example, the relational concepts Siblingx and Siblingi, understood as
above, are a priori coextensive even though, as we have seen, they are
quite distinct concepts. The (impure relational) property of being Siblingi
ofMark Thatcher would similarly be quite distinct from the (again: impure
relational) property of being a Sibling2 of Mark Thatcher, even though one
can know a priori that for any x, x has the former property iff x has the
latter property. A common example which is used to illustrate this finer
individuation policy is the case of the properties of triangularity and trilat
erality, defined in terms, respectively, of having three internal angles and of
having three sides, for rectilinearly bounded (Euclidean) plane figures. One
problem is to say which property a given predicate then signifies. For exam
ple, in English, we have the word 'sibling' without any subscripts: which
- or we should
relation does it express Siblingx and Siblingi? However,
note that we already have this problem, under another name, whether or
not we proceed with proposed identification of properties and relations
with concepts, since we have the question of which (if either) of these two
concepts enters into the sense of an English sentence containing the word
'sibling'. (See note 21.)

(It is not to be assumed that a 'consists
in' statement amounts to nothing
more than a property-identity statement, for the present conception of prop
erties. That would be a most implausible claim in view of the asymmetry
of the former statements. More plausibly, we might say that on the present
conception, according to which a property is structured concept, what is
required for the correctness of a statement to the effect that being-con

sists in being... is that the same property is specified in the two blanks, the
latter blank giving a specification inwhich more of its conceptual structure
ismade explicit than by what fills the former blank.)
The geometrical example above may be found in various places, includ
ing Sober (1982) and Johnston (1991); the following remarks appear in the
latter:
Now even
though "all and only Fs
are Gs" is both necessary and a priori, the predicates "F"
and "F" may express different concepts. For "three sided closed plane figure" and "three
angled closed plane figure" evidently express different concepts, the one built up from the
concept of a side and other conceptual material, the second built up from that conceptual
material and the concept of an angle. This suggests a structural condition on conceptual
identity according towhich concepts are distinct if they are built up from distinct concepts
by the same pattern of combination. Let us then mean by "conceptual equivalence" analytic
and a priori equivalences which meet the structural condition.22
Although the identification of properties with (one-place) concepts is

?
the most obvious and natural, there remains a possibility which we
-
shall not exploit of proceeding differently. This second option is to
continue to individuate properties in some coarser way (such as by a priori
coextensiveness), so that there is a many-one correspondence between

concepts and properties (and relations too, of course). In this case we have
to adopt a slightly devious course in interpreting claims to the effect that
this or that property is positive relational, impure, etc. What we do is see
how the property is referred to in the claim in question and then evaluate
the claim with the concept thereby invoked to pick out the property, being
aware that if another expression referring to the same property had been
substituted, the truth-value of the claim might be different. In other words,
we tacitly understand such claims as having appended to them the rider
'under that description'. We can illustrate this device with the aid of an
example from the Digression in Section 3 below: the property being six
metres away from a rhododendron from which nothing is six metres away,
which, in view of the involvement with distance relations, is a relational
property under that description, though it (the same property, if properties
are individuated by a priori coextensiveness of predicates) is not a relational
property under the description 'the property of being both made of tin and
not made of tin'.23 This would be precisely analogous to our saying (with
Davidson) that Jones'switching on the light was intentional whereas his
alerting the prowler was not intentional, even though Jones' switching on
the light was the very same action as his alerting the prowler.24 The idea (in
Davidson) is that this one action can be intentional under one description
('switching on the light'), and unintentional under another ('alerting the
prowler'). with ordinary usage outside
This is consilient of the philosophy
of action, since people do say such things as that Jones' switching on the
light was intentional. In the case of interest to us, however, there is no such
pretheoretical usage to respect and no point in the 'under a description'

manoevre. Why not just say, having made clear that property talk is here
understood as talk of concepts, that the rhododendron property cited above
is relational, that the tin-and-not-tin property is non-relational, and that
these are (unsurprisingly) distinct properties?
The properties just cited each apply, as an a priori knowable matter,
to nothing at all, while those from note 23 apply, a priori knowably, to
everything whatever. Rather than leave the reader with the possible mis
apprehension that it is only on such degenerate cases that the present

distinctions bear, we recall the contrast, introduced ? propos of the gen
eralized form of Karmo's problem above, between the property of being

made of tin (non-relational, we are taking it) and the property of
being
made of the same material as something made of tin (relational).
Similarly,
of course, with the kind of example that gave rise to Karmo's problem in
its original form, on the further assumption that one can know a priori
of God's existence and omniscience, being made of tin and being known
by God to be made of tin are a priori coextensive properties the first of
which is non-relational and the second of which is an impure relational
property.
3. INSTINSICPROPERTIES:
KIM AND LEWIS
We turn from the relational/non-relational distinction to two distinctions

described in the Introduction as worthier candidates for the title 'extrin
sic/intrinsic distinction'. The first of these, the topic of the present section, is
one whose clarification and application has much exercised David Lewis.
It actually subdivides into two distinctions, one favoured by Lewis and
another (apparently) favoured by Jaegwon Kim. The most useful way to
convey the difference between extrinsicness and relationality is to begin
with a tour of some of Lewis' writings on the former subject (though
comparative remarks are reserved for Section 5).

- as a
Lewis (1983a,b) presents us starting point on which further illu
? a
mination is to be welcomed with pair of interdefinable notions: intrin
sicness (a property of properties) and of duplication (a relation between
objects). The latter is the idea of two things being 'exactly alike'. The
definitions look like this:
Intr(P)?*VxVy(Dupl(x, y)-^(Px^Py))
Dupl{x, y)<r>VP{Intr{P)->{Px^Py))
Thus, intrinsic properties are those properties w.r.t. which no pair of dupli
cates (could) differ, and objects are duplicates when they agree w.r.t. all
their intrinsic properties. Properties which are not intrinsic will be called
extrinsic.25
The above definition of Intr(P) provides what in the Introductionwe
called a 'global' notion of intrinsicness, and before proceeding to the Kim
Lewis debate, it is worth pausing to isolate a natural 'local' analogue of
this notion, namely that given by:
Intri0C{P, x)+*Vy(Dupl(x, y)->Py)

The properties locally intrinsic to an object, according to this definition,
are those possessed by all its duplicates. Since duplication is reflexive, it
228 I.L. HUMBERSTONE
follows that if Intrioc(P, a) then a has the property P, so that an adverbial

formulation is not misleading: a has property P intrinsically. However,
another reformulation which may also be suggested by this implication,
namely calling the properties locally intrinsic to an object the locally
intrinsic properties of that object, is potentially misleading since from
the fact that Intrioc(P, a) it does not similarly follow that Intr(P). An
example wouldbe the property of being either made of tin or adjacent to
something ismade of tin (as would
which also be the example quoted from
Lewis below, of being either square or accompanied). Call this property
P. P is not intrinsic since something possessing it in virtue of being next
to something made of tin will have duplicates lacking it. But if a is made
of tin, then not only a, but any duplicate of a, will have the property P.
Thus Intrioc (P, a) even though not Intr (P).We return to this 'disjunctive
properties' phenomenon below,26 in the more general guise of the condition
that the class of intrinsic properties be closed under implication.
Duplication is an equivalence relation. We have just exploited its reflex
ivity, and we now exploit its symmetry. (The fact that duplication is transi
tive?let us mention lest anyone feel short-changed?plays a crucial role in
the objection against Lewis by Dunn thatwe have labelled (?) in Section
4 below.) From the fact that duplication is symmetric, the reader will have
no difficulty in concluding that the '<->' on the right of the above definition
of Intr can be dropped to a '-?' without loss of logical strength. This will
help us see the relationship between the local and global duplication-based
notions of intrinsicness. The result of that modification is that the r.h.s.
now looks like this
VxVy(Dupl(x, y)->(Px-*Py))
We permute antecedents, obtaining
Mx\fy(Px-*(Dupl(x, y)-+Py))
or in other words
Vx(Px-My(Dupl{x, y)->Py))
as an alternative formulation of the definiens of Intr (P). The consequent

of this latest formulation (discarding the 'W) is now identicalwith the
definiens of Intri0C(P,x). Thus the global and local notions are related
thus: the intrinsic properties are precisely those which are locally intrinsic
to all their possessors.
In his (1983a), Lewis sets up the dialectic intowhich he fits a suggestion
of Kim's by asking ifwe might try breaking into the "tight little circle of
interdefinability"27 provided by the above pair of definitions of Intr and

Dupl. He takes Kim's suggested account (Kim 1982a) of 'internality' of
properties as a way of trying to do this, and argues that it fails. (We will
attend to the question of whether Kim was in fact trying to do this below.)
First, Lewis argues that it fails ifwe
try to take internality to be intrinsicness
(of properties). Then, he goes on to argue that a modification of such a
proposal, which would instead see internality as providing the basis clause
of an inductive definition of intrinsicness also fails. We need to have Kim's
notion of internality before us to follow this. Here is the definition, as
simplified by Lewis:
P is internal ?-? Possibly some object x has P although no
contingent object wholly distinct from x exists.
What Lewis by 'wholly distinct from #' is: having no part in com
means
mon with x. (That is, what is often expressed with the term 'disjoint'.) The
'
reason we find 'no contingent object wholly distinct from x is that if there
are necessarily existing things (such as numbers and other mathematical
objects, and perhaps God, space, time, etc.) then without the 'contingent',
no property could be internal.
The discussion of this definition proceeds with the aid of two specially
introduced properties, the property of being accompanied and the prop
erty of being lonely, defined respectively as the property of coexisting,
and the property of not coexisting, with some wholly distinct contingent
object. (Recall that with Lewis' ontology these are properties of objects
simpliciter; on the view according to which one and the same object can
exist in more than one world, one would say that an object x is accom
panied in w iff some contingently existing object wholly distinct from x
exists in w. Likewise in the case of loneliness.28)
In these terms, as Lewis puts it (p. 198), "Kim's idea, in a nutshell, is that
extrinsic properties are those that imply accompaniment, whereas intrinsic
properties are compatible with loneliness", and (p. 199) "the failure of
Kim's proposal should now be plain to see. Loneliness is just as extrinsic
as accompaniment, yet it certainly does not imply accompaniment and
is
certainly it compatible with itself. The reason Lewis says that loneliness
is extrinsic is simple: a duplicate of a lonely object need not be lonely, so
loneliness is not an intrinsic property. Here it is useful to remark that the
idea of an intrinsic property is the idea of a property a thing has in and
of itself: but considering a thing in itself is not the same as supposing the
thing to be by itself. An object's not being 'by itself is not more a matter of
how that object is 'in itself than an object's being by itself is: either way,
we have to consider how things are outside the object, whether we want to
know that there are not or know that there are, extraneous accompanying
objects.
We continue to quote Lewis (1983a), from p. 199:
Kim has defined the positive extrinsic properties, as we may call them: accompaniment,
and all other properties that imply it.We can with equal ease define the negative extrinsic
properties: loneliness, and all other properties that imply it.
The first label here will recall the terminology of positive (or more explic
itly: positive existential) relational properties from Section 2. Being six
metres away from a rhododendron is a positive extrinsic property in this
case (assuming nothing can be six metres away from itself29: to have this
property, one must be 'accompanied' (by the rhododendron, if nothing
else). The second label is introduced in a puzzling way. It would seem
more natural to count not being six metres away from a rhododendron
(understood as: not being six metres away from any rhododendron) as a
negative extrinsic property. Those who share this feeling will want to refor
mulate Lewis' definition of a negative extrinsic property, from "loneliness,
and all other properties that imply it" to "loneliness, and all other properties
that are implied by it". (Though of course Lewis is free to define the term
as he wishes.)
As mentioned above, Lewis first shows that Kim's notion of internality
does not amount to the same as intrinsicness, and then goes on to show that
it cannot serve as the basis clause in an inductive definition of intrinsicness.
We have completed the presentation of the first of these two goals. Not
being six metres from any rhododendron (whatever we decide about the
positive/negative terminology) is certainly an extrinsic property, not an
intrinsic one: it is a property
but that an unaccompanied (alias lonely)
object could possess (indeed: would have to possess), and so it counts as
'internal'. Thus intrinsicness and internality are not the same.
So much for tying the present discussion in with that of Section 2. We
pass now to the idea, raised by Lewis (p. 199) that "we might hope to
build on Kim's proposal, making it the basis for an inductive definition
that would cover all the extrinsicproperties, leaving the (more important)
intrinsic properties as residue".30 The sentence just quoted follows the
(definitive) claim that the class of extrinsic properties is closed under nega
tion, and the (tentatively raised) suggestion that disjunctions of extrinsic
properties are extrinsic. The inductive idea is that we might use Kim's
surrogate for extrinsicness (i.e., non-internality) to give us a basic class of
extrinsic properties, and then define the class of all extrinsic properties as
those together with any property obtainable from them by applying such
logical operations as negation (complementation) and disjunction (union).
Actually, what Lewis considers is a slightly different proposal, namely that
we also?in to negation and disjunction-

addition let in any property which
implies (or entails) a property already in the class. The motivation for this
requirement is that if we have a property such as being square and six
metres a then ?
from rhododendron, this the intrinsicness of being square
notwithstanding?should count as extrinsic since duplicates need not agree
with to its possession,
respect in virtue of the other conjunct (in the com
plex predicate we have just employed to specify the property). Lewis refers
to this requirement as the requirement that the class of extrinsic properties
be closed under converse implication. In view of the preceding quotation
from Lewis inset above, which characterizes the non-internal properties as
those which imply accompaniment, if this converse implication condition
is included, we need not start from the Kim non-internal properties, taking
instead as our 'basis' class the class consisting just of the property of being
accompanied, as in the quotation below.
Lewis returns a negative verdict on the proposal he has teased out of
Kim's dicussion:
No hope: a class of properties containing accompaniment closed under negation and dis
junction and converse implication would be the class of all properties.
The proof of this claim is given on p. 200 of Lewis (1983a), andwill not be
reproduced here. It does seem worth mentioning, though, that the proposal
as here described can be streamlined somewhat: there is no need separately
to list closure under disjunction alongside closure under negation and con
verse implication, since any class of properties
closed under negation and
converse implication be closed must
under disjunction also. For suppose
that F and G are in the class; we must show that so too is the property
of having either F or G. We can do so without even making use of the
assumption that G is in the class. For, by closure under negation, not-F is

in the class, and therefore so also, by converse implication, is not-F and
not-G, and the negation of this is F-or-G, which must therefore also be in
the class.
Lewis concludes that "Our closure principles cannot all be right" (p.
200), which, in view of the above, we may restate as "cannot both be right";
the one that has to go is closure under converse implication:
squareness is intrinsic, but implies squareness or accompaniment; and the latter is extrinsic,
since it can differ between duplicates. (Thismuch is true: an intrinsic property cannot imply
an unconditionally extrinsic property, that being a property such that whenever something
has it, some perfect duplicate ofthat thing lacks it.)
Dunn (1990a) has an interesting diagnosis of the intuition here counter

manded: that the class of extrinsic properties should be closed under con
verse implication. This is of course equivalent to the claim that the class
of intrinsic properties is closed under implication, and Dunn's diagnosis

is that the appeal of this claim lies in the fact that it is correct, not (to put
the point in our terminology) for the global notion of intrinsinsicness, but
for the local notion. That is, ifP implies Q, then from Intrioc(P,a) it
does that Intr\0C(Q,
indeed follow a); the interested reader can check this
from the definition of 'Intr\0? given above. Actually, inDunn's own work
this whole duplication-based approach to (local or global) intrinsicness is
so this of out his not accurate -
rejected, way spelling diagnosis is though
for the present author it seems highly congenial. Dunn's own version of
the local/global contrast for intrinsicness will be described in Section 4.
Digression
A few remarks are in order on the parenthetical comment in the above

quotation. As was noted in the above discussion of a 'local' intrinsicness
notion Intrioc, the definition of Intr in terms of Dupl can be massaged
into the following form:
Intr(P)^\/x(Px-+Vy(Dupl(x, y)-*Py))
Thus for P to be extrinsic is for the following to be the case
~ i.e.
(i) \/x(Px^>\/y(Dupl(x, y)-*Py)),
(ii) 3x(Px & 3y(Dupl(x, y) &~ Py))
whereas for P to be 'unconditionally extrinsic' in the sense introduced in
the preceding quotation, is for it to be the case that
(iii) Vx(Px-*3y(Dupl(x, y)&~ Py))

Under what conditions does (iii) imply (ii)? Precisely when 3x(Px) is
true. If this is not true ? which, since we have reverted to Lewis' way of
speaking, in which modal operators are dropped and quantification is over
all possible objects, is when P is a property it is impossible to possess
?
(the empty class ofpossibilia) then (iii) will be ('vacuously' ) true, while
(ii) is false. So, for instance, on these definitions, the property of being a
round square is an unconditionally extrinsic property but not an extrinsic
property. To avoid this awkwardness, itwould probably be better to have
defined an unconditionally extrinsic property not as "a property such that
whenever something has it, some perfect duplicate ofthat thing lacks it",
but rather as "an extrinsic property such that whenever something has it,
some perfect duplicate ofthat thing lacks it".31 Of course, an equivalent
modification would be to replace the "a property such that ..." by "a
property with at least one (possible) instance, such that... ". This (minor)
alteration at least saves us from

having an intrinsic property count as
unconditionally extrinsic, but it still doesn't quite save Lewis' remark that
the latter are never implied by the former, since a logically unpossessable
property32 still counts as intrinsic and implies all properties, including

the unconditionally extrinsic properties (however these are defined). The
simplest way to fix things is to exclude this one case: to say that no non
empty intrinsic property implies an unconditionally extrinsic property. (See
note 31 for a justification of this claim.) Indeed, even the modification
suggested to the notion of unconditional extrinsicness overlap to avoid
with intrinsicness could be avoided by simply prefacing the quoted passage
from Lewis towhich this Digression is appended, the remark that 'property'
for the sake of the points to follow means 'non-empty property'. End of
Digression.
We turn now to the topic of Kim's own (informal) notion of intrinsicness.

We have seen that Lewis regards the notion of internality, as defined in
Kim (1982a), as an attempt at breaking into his (Lewis's) circle of interde
finabilities intrinsicness)
(duplication, 'from the outside'. This may well
be to charge Kim with failure in a task he had not set himself anyway.
We need not here go into the broader context of Kim's discussion, beyond
remarking that Kim is interested in a thesis of psychophysical superve
nience: a thesis to the effect that there can be no psychological differences
between subjects physically exactly alike. To give this thesis a plausible
form, he takes psychological differences to be (what one might naturally
call) differences in respect of intrinsic psychological states. Although early

on in his discussion (p. 52) Kim happens to use the term 'duplicates':
The problem about the shared psychological life of persons and their physical duplicates
can be given perspicaceous reformulation in terms of supervenience: Are psychological
properties (...) supervenient upon physical properties (...)?
it is far from clear that he is using this term in precisely Lewis' technical
sense. For most of the paper, the term used is 'replica':
I believe that most of us are strongly inclined to accept the doctrine of psychophysical
in some form. Your replica is not only a person, but a person who is
supervenience
psychologically indistinguishable from you. (p. 53)
and this term very definitely does not behave like Lewis' 'duplicate'. There
are three differences, the first of which is of no importance to anything,
the second of which is important to understanding the passage just quoted,
though not especially important for our purposes, and a third difference
which will turn out tomatter. (We note that the term 'Doppelg?nger' in, for
example, the Twin Earth literature behaves like Kim's 'replica'.) The least
important difference is that as Kim uses the terms, the relation is a replica
of is not symmetric: a replica of x is some kind of copy of x, replicated
so as to resemble x precisely in certain respects. The original individual is
not a replica of this replica (and nor, presumably, were several replicas of
x to be made, would they be replicas of each other). The asymmetry of this
relation is of no importance to Kim's discussion or to Lewis', and we might
just as well understand it to be ironed out, by taking the replica relation

to be the (strictly, ancestral of the) union of this asymmetric relation with
its converse. The second difference is that for the sake of the passage just
quoted, we must understand by a replica a physical replica, that is, to be

indiscernible in respect of physical properties. (It is not to our purpose
here to try and work out what makes a property a physical property.)
For the point of the supervenience thesis under consideration by Kim
is that such indiscernibility will guarantee indiscernibility in respect of
psychological properties (and here the preceding parenthetical comment
To iron out this difference, we could
applies again, mutatis mutandis).
use the qualified phrases 'physical replica' and 'psychological replica',
and state the supervenience thesis in the form: individuals related by the
former relation must be related by the latter.
The most important of the three differences between Kim's
replica
relation, and Lewis'
duplicate relation, Even
is the least obvious. if we
suppose that the two differences just commented on are 'ironed out', this
one remains, and we can put it in Lewis' terms as follows. What Kim
understands by a replica of x iswhat Lewis would understand by a duplicate
of x in the same possible world as x. Recalling Lewis' idea that no one
individual literally exists in more than one world, there is a relation ? the
?
world-mate relation which determinately holds or fails to hold between
any (possible) individuals, according as they exist in the same world or in
different worlds.33 The textual evidence that could be cited to support this
interpretation of Kim (1982a) comes from p. 66f, thereof, on which we

read, concerning me (= Kim) and my (newly created) replica:
?
We do share
structural properties. Our basic physical structure is identical
dispositional
-
at least for now and we share the same physical powers, capacities, and dispositions.
How doesthis support the 'world-mate (physical) duplicate' interpretation

of 'replica'? Well, a duplicate of an object x which exists in another
world from x need not "share the same physical powers, capacities, and
dispositions" as x, since the physical laws in this other world may be

different from those in x's world, and what the physical powers, etc., of an
object are depends on such laws. For example, let x be a particular sugar
lump in the actual world and let y be a duplicate of x in a world whose
physical laws are different in such a way that in that world sugar does not
dissolve inwater (at a temperature of 90?, say, for the sake of definiteness).
Then x iswater-soluble but this is a dispositional property it does not share
with y, even though y is a duplicate of x. On the other hand, if we restrict
attention to duplicates which are world-mates, then it is arguable that any
such dispositional properties must be shared, since there is no analogous
variation in the laws. It is on this basis that we conclude (provisionally) that
what Kim means by 'replica' builds in this 'world-mate' element absent
from Lewis' notion of a duplicate.
The informal notion of intrinsicness with which Kim is working, then,
admits of a Lewis-style definition as follows: P is Kim-intrinsic iff any
two duplicates which are world-mates agree with respect to P.34 (Agree
ing w.r.t. a property means of course: either both having or both lacking
the property.) Properties which are not Kim-intrinsic will be called Kim
extrinsic. (In the interests of even-handedness, we will sometimes from this
point on use 'Lewis-intrinsic' for intrinsicness understood Lewis' way. In

the interests of fairness to Kim, we note now that at the end of this section,
another notion which we shall call Kim^-instrinsicness,
of intrinsicness,
will be shown to be extractableon the basis of the same textual evidence.)
The question is therefore re-opened as to whether Kim's own suggestion
? -
in the shape of the notion of internality which Lewis showed failed to
be equivalent to intrinsicness, is after all equivalent to Kim-intrinsicness.
Only if there is a failure of equivalence here would it be correct to think

Kim had failed in a task he set himself.
However, the question is no sooner re-opened than closed: our presen
tation of Lewis' case against internality-as-intrinsicness was given with
the aid, for illustration, of the property of being six metres from a rhodo
dendron, and its complementary property, that of not being six metres
away from any rhododendron. Note that the former property is not only
extrinsic, but Kim-extrinsic: it's a property on which duplicate world-mates
cannot be relied on to agree. The same goes for the latter property. But
the latter property is evidently internal: its possession does not imply the
existence (in the same world) of a contingent object wholly distinct from
its possessor. So internality and Kim-intrinsicness are not the same.35
So far our only examples of Kim-intrinsic properties which were not
Lewis-intrinsic were the admittedly controversial cases of dispositions
(including powers and capacities). Lewis' own discussion features, in pass

ing, a much more straightforward example. After giving it, as Example 1
below, we give a further illustration (Example 2) which has been a focus
of concern for Dunn (1987, 1990a).
EXAMPLE 1. Lewis (1983a, p. 199) mentions in passing the property

of coexisting with exactly six pigs (wholly distinct from oneself). This
property is Lewis-extrinsic but it is not Kim-extrinsic. It is, therefore, Kim
intrinsic but not Lewis-intrinsic. The property is clearly Lewis-extrinsic,
since a duplicate in a pig-free world of an object which in some world
containing six pigs will not share with the latter object the property in
question. But it is still Kim-intrinsic, since within any one world, any
? or not - on
objects duplicates will agree this property.
Our second example shares the odd feature brought out here by saying
'duplicates or not'.(Actually, as we note in the Remark below, this is
not quite correct for Example 1 itself.) It is worth introducing a piece of
terminology to highlight this feature, so let us call a property possessor
independent when any world-mate of something possessing the property,

possesses the property. An equivalent definition would characterize the
properties as those w.r.t. which world-mates never

possessor-independent
differ.
EXAMPLE 2. In the papers mentioned above, Dunn considers the predicate

'is such that Socrates was wise', as it figures in such sentences as 'Reagan
is such that Socrates was wise'. As Dunn notes, in spite of their frequent
occurrence in the logical literature, it is not actually completely clear that
such sentences as this one are grammatical sentences of English. Their
doubtful status reflects the fact that in semi-formal dress they may appear
as
Reagan is an x such that Socrates was wise.
and one expects the variable x to show up (free) in the underlined part, as
in the more straightforward
is an x such that x was a U.S. president.

Reagan
However, we can easily fix this oddity, by considering instead (of the first
inset sentence above):
= x and Socrates
Reagan is an x such that x was wise.
Accordingly, understand the variable-free 'Reagan is such that Socrates

was wise
was wise' along the latter lines. Now, being such that Socrates
comes out as a Kim-intrinsic property, since not only can no duplicate
world-mates differ w.r.t. it (which is what matters for Kim-intrinsicness)
? as was -
but said for Example 1 no world-mates whatever could differ
w.r.t. to it.
Remark. last point is not quite correct for Example

This 1, even though
it was in presenting
claimed the Example (which remains as an exam
ple of the divergence between Lewis-intrinsicness and Kim-intrinsicness).

After all, if you are not a pig and coexist with six pigs wholly distinct from
yourself, then none of those pigs or any of their parts will co-exist with six
pigs (with six pigs) wholly distinct from itself. To have the feature claimed
-
what we have called possessor-independence- the example would have
to be changed to something more along the lines of Example 2, e.g., to the
property of being such that there are exactly six pigs in existence or (in
more Lewis-like terms) existing in a world in which there exist exactly six
pigs. (In fact, this is how we could rephrase the problematic property of
Example 2: existing in a world in which Socrates was wise?6)
If we compare the merits of Lewis-intrinsicness and Kim-intrinsicness

as explications of an informal idea of intrinsic properties, the fact that
all of what we have called possessor-independent properties come out
as Kim-intrinsic tells very much in favour of Lewis-instrinsicness. The
possessor-independent properties come in two sorts: those which have
contingent instances and those which do not. Any property which lacks
contingent applies either to all possible

instances objects or to none, so
that it is not a property with respect to which duplicates differ, and comes
out as Lewis-intrinsic. (We noted this for the case of properties applying to
no possible objects in note 32 above.) These very special limiting cases do
not serve well as test cases
for the consilience of a proposed explication of
some the intuitive features of the explicandum.
informal notion with One is
inclined to say that if it turns out on Lewis' explication of intrinsicness that
the properties of being either round or not round, and of being both made
of tin and not made of tin, emerge as intrinsic (as they do), then that's that:
if we are satisfied with the account's deliverances in the cases for which
we do have a strong intuitive feel, we can accept its verdicts here.37
The status of contingently exemplified possessor-independent proper
ties is rather different, though. As we shall see in the following section,
Dunn's approach to intrinsicness ismotivated by taking as paradigmatical
ly extrinsic such properties as that of being such that Socrates was wise.
Similarly (cf. the above Remark) the property of existing in a world con
taining exactly six pigs does not seem an intuitively plausible candidate for
an intrinsic property (even- to introduce the 'local' notion- for a property
intrinsically possessed by any of the pigs). Since such contingently pos
sessed properties are all possessor-independent,however, they all qualify

as Kim-intrinsic. A mark
against Kim-instrinsicness, then.
But: a mark against Kim? Perhaps not. For what we have called Kim
instrinsicness on the basis of the above quotation with its allusions to pow
ers and dispositions is not the only notion of intrinsicness which would
support such allusions. (Reminder: we are interested in the informal ideas
behind Kim's discussion rather than his proposed explications of them.)
We could retain these dispositional properties as intrinsic by casting our net
over duplicates further afield than just over world-mates, even though we
should lose them ifwe considered arbitrary duplicates, without restriction.
Consider, for example the notion of P's being a Kim* -intrinsic proper
ty, defined to be the case iff any two duplicates from worlds with the
same natural laws agree with respect to P. All Kim+-instrinsic proper
ties are Kim-intrinsic, since duplicates drawn from the same world are
drawn from a world with the same laws as itself (even if it is a world
with nolaws). Water-solubility and other such dispositional properties
are presumably Kim+ -intrinsic, in accordance with the quotation from
Kim, but the anomalously Kim-intrinsic properties (from the contingent
possessor-independent category) are not Kim+ -intrinsic.38 The resultant
classification of dispositions is certainly to be welcomed (see note 34),
though it remains unclear that we cm justify building into a characteriza
tion of intrinsicness a restriction to nomologically accessible worlds. From
a suitably elevated position, this has an element of arbitrariness about it:
to ? same as
why not restrict attention worlds not, with the laws ours, but
? as ours? We will not go fur
with the same tourism statistics for Naples
ther into the question of whether nomological possibility has the requisite
absoluteness to justify its figuring in the characterization of a fundamen
tal notion of
intrinsicness, beyond noting that a positive answer would
seem to be available if the view Brian Ellis calls scientific essentialism is
accepted. According to this view- as defended in Ellis (1991), Bigelow
et al. (1991), andmost especially for the present point, Bigelow (1990) ?
the nomologically possible worlds are ways this world might have been
(while the merely 'logically possible' worlds include many to which such
a description does not apply).
4. MOORE AND DUNN

INTRINSICPROPERTIES:
Lewis-intrinsicness and arguably also Kim+ -intrinsicness have a feature

which we might allude to by describing them as versions of the idea of
a purely qualitative property. As we shall see in this section, it is far
from clear that every intuitive notion of intrinsicness can be so described.
This vague phrase, 'purely qualitative', is intended to suggest some kind

of abstracting away from any particular individual. The characterization
of Lewis-instrinsicness in terms of the duplication relation achieves such
abstraction by the device of quantifying over duplicates of an object,
which do not share that object's particularity (or 'haecceity' to use a more
traditional term). On the other hand, there is the idea that an intrinsic
property is one whose possession just depends on the possessor itself: the
idea of a property a thing possesses, as we put it in Section 3, "in and of
itself. For want of a better word, let us use the phrase 'interior property'
for a property of this kind. As we shall see in a moment, these two informal
?
ideas associated with intrinsicness namely, being a purely quantitative
- are
property, and being an interior property actually quite distinct, and,
since it is only the former idea that is crystallized into precise shape by
Lewis' notion of
intrinsicness (as well as the Kim+ variant), it will be
worth our while
to give the latter some attention. This we can do in the
course of seeing why the two ideas are in fact distinct. Their distinctness
was first pointed out by G. E. Moore in 1922, though his discussion is
rather involved (and the present observation arises as an aside in the course
-
of thinking about intrinsic value) and the point lay dormant but for
?
occasional treatment in the interim (e.g., Langford 1930) until it was
used inDunn (1990a) in criticism of Lewis.
Moreprecisely, Moore points out that there is a risk of confusion if
we assume that as he puts it (1922, p. 262), the phrase 'having a differ
ent intrinsic nature' is equivalent to the phrase 'intrinsically different' or
'having different intrinsic properties'. As he continues:
For it is obvious that there is a sense in which, when things are exactly
alike, they must
be 'intrinsically different' and have different intrinsic
properties, merely because they are
two. For instance, two patches of colour may be exactly alike, in spite of the fact that
each possesses a constituent which the other does not possess, provided only that their two
constituents are exactly alike. And yet, in a certain sense, it is obvious that the fact that
each has a constituent which the other has not got, does constitute an intrinsic difference
between them, and implies that each has an intrinsic property the other has not got.
Moore goes on to point out that the same applies, not just with the property
of having such-and-such a constituent (= such-and-such a part), but with
the property of being (identical with) such-and-such an object. To stick
with the former kind of case for the moment, suppose that b is a part of a.
Then it is, to use the label suggested above for this notion of intrinsicness,
an interior property of a that it has 6 as a part. But having 6 as a part is
not an intrinsic property of a in the sense of purely qualitative property,
since a (qualitative) duplicate of a is not guaranteed to have this property.
When Dunn (1990a, p. 178) characterizes the interiority-based notion of
intrinsicness he says "Metaphysically, an intrinsic property of an object is
a property that the object has by virtue of itself, depending on no other
thing". Note that to have this fit with the example just given, of the property
of having 6 as a part, 'no other thing' should be understood as 'no wholly
distinct thing', in Lewis' mereological sense, rather than in the weaker
sense of 'no thing different from the thing in question', since 6 is certainly
a different thing from (= not the same thing as) a in the case envisaged.
Dunn goes on from the sentence just quoted to give a characterization
in epistemological terms, which characterization he rightly describes as
not fundamental: "Epistemologically, an intrinsic
property would be a
property that one could determine by inspection of the object itself? in
particular, for a physical object, one would not have to look outside its
region of space-time." This talk of not having to look outside of course is
compatible with having to look inside, and hence with the remark just made
as to how to construe the phrase 'no other thing' in Dunn's metaphysical
characterization.39 (Hence too, the use of the term 'interior' for intrinsic
properties on the present conception; of course, the term 'internal' would
have been a slightly more natural choice, but as we have seen, the use of
'internal' as a technical term has been pre-empted by Kim, and itwould
be confusing it again here in a different sense.)
to use
Turning now
to identity, we can combine the discussion of Moore ( 1922)
with that of Dunn ( 1990a), to give the following two sorts of example urged
by Dunn against Lewis' duplication-based account of intrinsicness. (From

the perspective of the present paper these examples should be regarded
rather as showing the need to distinguish between intrinsicness as pure
and intrinsicness as interiority: neither notion needs to be
qualitativeness
rejected as illegitimate, nor even as less deserving a thing to mean by
'intrinsic' than the other.)
(a) Being identical with a (or Being one and the same object as
a) comes out as an intrinsic property of a on the conception
of intrinsic properties as interior properties; it certainly looks
like a property a has "by virtue of itself, depending on no other
thing". But on Lewis' account it is not an intrinsic property,

since a will have duplicates not sharing it.
On the other hand:
of a comes out on the interior conception as

(?) Being a duplicate
not being an a
intrinsic property, since this is property anything
?
other than a will have only "by virtue of to echo Dunn's
- to a
phrasing its relations (in particular, its qualitative indis
cernibility from a). On the other hand, according to Lewis'

account, since the duplication relation is transitive, anything

which is a duplicate of something with the property being a
duplicate of a will itself have this property (and conversely),

which is to say that the property in question is intrinsic.
Thereare thus, very real differences between the class of interior prop
erties and the class of purely qualitative properties, and an effort to adjudi
cate as to which class better deserves the name 'intrinsic' would not be as
profitable as as itwould be to attempt to investigate these differences.40
As for differences between the purely qualitative and the interior, the
first that strikes us is perhaps that we understand the former notion some
what more completely than the latter, at least when the former is precisified
as Lewis-intrinsicness, in view of its interdefinability with the duplication
-
relation. Tight little circle or not, we think we know- more or less what
we are talking about here.41 What light can be thrown on interiority? The
purely qualitative properties of an object are all to be numbered amongst
its interior properties, along with some others, such as those already men
tioned: having a particular object as a part, being identical with a particular
object. By analogy with the taxonomy of Section 2, Rae Langton has
suggested42 that we speak of the purely qualitative and these other non
qualitative interior properties as, respectively, pure and impure intrinsic

?
properties. It is an interesting question whether such talk of impurity
admittedly highly suggestive in the present connexion-could be justified
by a direct application of the ideas in Section 2, or is only more loosely
analogous. An attempt at such a justification might proceed by calling a
relation part-directed when it can hold only between an object and a (not
necessarily proper) part of that object. Then, recalling Definition 2' from
Section 2, which said that P is impure just in case there is some relation R
and there is some individual y such that having property P is (necessarily)
equivalent to standing in relation R to y, we might distinguish a subclass
of impure intrinsic properties as those answering to the above description
with the modification that instead of saying that there is 'some relation
'
R... we 'some relation R... '.
say part-directed
Now, because of Karmo's problem and its kin, in Section 2, we fol

lowed Khamara in abandoning Definition 2! in favour of Definition 2,
which introduced the 'consists in' formulation to replace the above ref
erence to (necessary and/or a priori) equivalence: and this forced a very
different conception of properties from that which served us through Sec
tion 3. Therefore, we either fail to unify the currently mooted extension
of the impurity terminology to the non-qualitative interior properties, or
? a similar change to a 'consists in' for
achieving such unity by making
mulation of the definition -
just suggested of impure intrinsic properties
we fail to make the interior properties all qualify as properties on any

one understanding of 'property'. For there will be the impure intrinsics,
understood as properties in the sense of Section 2, and there will also be
the purely qualitative properties, which, if treated either as Lewis-intrinsic
or as Kim+ -intrinsic, are properties in the sense of Section 3. (More on
this distinction in Section 5 below.) Yet this second option seems no more
palatable than the first: the interiority is (by whatever name) an intuitively
? a or not possession
intelligible feature of properties matter of whether of
the property is entirely determined by what is the case within the confines
of the would-be possessor, and the fact that this includes
such properties
as being red as well as such properties as having a certain part (or indeed,
being a certain individual) ought not to force us to speak of these two cases
in terms of radically different notions of property, with different identi
ty conditions, different relations to the predicates which 'express' them,
and so on. These reasons with not being happy with a literal construal
of the phrase 'impure intrinsic' as applied to properties will be reconsid
ered in Section 5, but for the moment let us accept them and see what is
available.
Is there, then, a way of explaining interiority in such a way that makes
the properties about which we can intelligibly ask whether they have this
feature, properties in exactly the same sense as the properties about which
the analogous question for Lewis-instrinsicness can be asked? The answer
had better be Yes, if we want to say that the Lewis-instrinsic properties,
together with those provisionally described as 'impure intrinsic' proper
ties, are all of them interior properties. Let us follow the path suggested by
Lewis' Dupl-Intr interdefinability. The duplication relation is not enough
to preserve all interior properties, since the impure intrinsics are not guar
anteed to be inherited by duplicates of objects possessing them. A tighter
relation is required. Call it 'superduplication'. Intuitively, a superduplicate
of an object is something which is just the way that object is, considered
in itself. Since we include here a given object's being that very object,
there are no (distinct) superduplicate world-mates. But across worlds, the
superduplication relation can hold. Very well, then, we have our new inter
definabilities (writing 'SupV for the superduplication relation, and 'Inter'
for interiority):
Inter(P)<r?\lx\/y(Supl(x,y)-+(Px^Py))
Supl(x, y)^\/P(Inter(P)-+(Px<r*Py))
Since we are thinking of these equivalences in the same way as of their
Lewis prototypes, we must enter the usual caveats about the need to modu
late between the way we normally speak and the metaphysically corrected
formulations. It is not literally the case (on Lewis' picture: see note 25)
that a superduplicate inwi of an object a which has a part b inw\ will itself
have b as a part in W2, rather this superduplicate of a will have a counterpart
of b as a (similarly located and qualitatively indiscernible) part in i?2.43
Likewise any otherworldly superduplicate of a is itself a counterpart of a.
However, we shall not let these complications prevent us from saying that
the property of having b as a part, and the property of being identical with
a, are interior properties.
-
This new interdefinability is likely not to seem any more edifying and
-
to many may well seem considerably less so than the original Dupl/Intr
interdefinability. Matters would be helped though, if we could 'break in'

here, even if this task were accomplished with the aid of notions from the
original pair. For example, we might try and characterize the Supl relation
in terms, inter alia, of the Dupl relation: perhaps we can say that x is a
superduplicate of y when x is both a duplicate of y and also a counterpart
(in Lewis' sense) of y.44 This works satisfactorily for the following interior
property of a's: being identical with a; since only counterparts of a can
have this property (to speak loosely), and none of them lack it. But it errs
in making all essential
properties of an individual a interior, since, being
possessed by all a's counterparts, they will be possessed by all things

which are both counterparts and duplicates of a. To avoid this problem,
one may be tempted to change 'and' to 'or': but now we wrongly end
up saying that all interior properties are essential to their bearers. (The
case - a
point is not so much that the commitments in either to denial of
the 'necessity of origin', in the first, for example, and to an affirmation
of mereological essentialism, indeed to an even less plausible 'qualitative
essentialism', in the second? are obviously false, as that they are not to be
settled definitionally, as they would be on either of the present proposals.)
We must leave the task of throwing more light on the notion of an interior
property as an open problem.
The remarks from Moore and Dunn directing our attention to interiority
as a notion of intrinsicness notwithstanding, Dunn's formal proposals do
not pretend to explicate this idea, so much as to give us a way of registering
when a property is possessed intrinsically by an object, and of working
out the consequences of such registrations. We give here the barest outline
of how these proposals work; they exploit the special logical properties
of the the implicational connective of the system R of relevant logic.
(See his 1987, 1990a, b). As remarked in Section 2, Dunn's paradigm
example of what he calls an irrelevant property is a property which is
possessor-independent; whether or not a property is a relevant property of

an individual should at least depend on the nature of that individual, and
the proposal is to see this as the non-linguistic side of what he calls relevant
predication. In more detail, then, Dunn deems P to be a relevant property
of a when the following is true:
=
\/x(x a^Px)
And the inset formula, whose '? ' is for relevant is

implication (? la R)
abbreviated to the 'relevant predication':
[px.Px]a
which may be read 'a is relevantly an x such that Px\ Now ifwe go back
to Example 2 from Section 2, we recall that there was something peculiar
about:
(*) Reagan is an x such that Socrates was wise.
Dunn invites us to compare this with things like the straightforward:
(**) Reagan is an x such that x was forgetful
We remarked in Section 2 that the absence of the variable '#' was a
relatively superficial feature of the first example, since we could conjoin

in 'x = x" if we want. Since this way of 'dummying in' a variable no
longer works against the present

logical background (quantified R with
identity, as envisaged by Dunn), we need another way. We can pick any
open formula in x, say Fx and use (as Dunn suggests)
(Socrates was wise V Fx) & Socrates was wise
since this is relevantly equivalent to its second conjunct, or alternatively
(the dual absorption law also being available in R):
(Socrates was wise & Fx) V Socrates was wise
which is equivalent to its second disjunct. Pick either of these equivalents,

and abbreviate it, for use below, to 'Socwise(#)'.45 We will take (*) to have
had its 'such that' phrase replaced by this.
In the case of (**), the truth of the corresponding relevant predication
follows from
was ?> Vx(x = was

Reagan forgetful Regan-^rr forgetful)
since its antecedent is true (we may suppose), and its consequent is the
relevant predication in question, alias (px.x was forgetful) Reagan. And
? ? we can regard this whole as itself true since
Dunn urges conditional
we think of Reagan's being or not being forgetful as a feature 'intrinsic to'
(in the sense of 'interior to') Reagan himself. Think of it this way. Given
that Reagan wasforgetful, then we can reason in ways that do not involve
smuggling in any irrelevancies from the further hypothesis concerning
an arbitrary individual x, that x = Reagan, to the conclusion that x was
forgetful. (We shall have occasion to weaken the association of relevant
predication with interiority below.)
Let us see, by contrast, how a parallel treatment of (*) would go. The
parallel would direct us to
Socrates was wise -? \/x(x =
Regan->Socwise(x))
Here the antecedent is true, and so is 'Vx(Socwise(x))'. But this is not
enough to allow usto infer the original consequent, (*), since it is far
from clear that in the case of an arbitrary individual x, x's being Reagan
relevantly implies, even given that Socrates was wise, that Socwise(rr).
Basically, this is just a glorified version of the 'fallacy of relevance' (the
schema A-?(B-?A), that is), in the particular case:
Socrates was wise ?> (x = Reagan ?? Socrates was wise)
(Recall that 'Socwise(#)' is relevantly equivalent to 'Socrates was wise'.)

An individual's being Reagan simply has nothing to do with whether
Socrates was wise, even on the hypothesis that Socrates was wise, whereas
an individual's being Reagan has everything to do, on the hypothesis that
Reagan was forgetful, with that individual's having been forgetful. This
leads to Dunn's explication of (what we are calling) interiority: the intrinsic
properties are those which, whenever truly predicated of an individual, are

relevant properties ofthat individual, i.e., are such that the hypothesis that
an arbitrary individual x is the given individual relevantly implies that x
has the property. (In fact, as has already been mentioned, and will be further
elaborated upon below, 'explication' is not the right word here.)
Given the involvement with the detailed workings of R that an extended
discussion of the above ideas would necessitate, we cannot here go beyond
a few comments. Firstly, Dunn has a distinction between local and global
versions of intrinsicness. The local form, saying that a is intrinsically such
as to posssess property P, is just the relevant predication statement
[px.Px]a
and the global form, which Dunn reads as saying that a given predicate is
of a kind that determines relevant properties, is
My(Py-^[px.Px)y)
or, spelt out in primitive notation:
=
Vy(Py-*Vx(x y-^Px))46
And, when one property's implying another is understood in terms of

relevant implication, the desirable feature of the local notion, that if P
implies Q then [px.Px]a implies [px.Qxja. (However, recall from Section
3, that this is also the case for the Lewis-style local notion Intr?oc.) Further,
given the assumptions about identity made inDunn (1987), such properties
as thatof being identicalwith some specified individual a do fall under the
global category here isolated, so that Dunn's objection (a) above against
Lewis does not arise for his own account. On the other hand, nothing has
been said to connect up the interior properties in general with relevant
predication. No reason has been
given for thinking of purely qualitative
or 'impure intrinsic'
properties, in preference over any other properties, as
answering to the above global notion of intrinsicness?as, that is, relevantly
possessed by any of their possessors. Nothing in Dunn's formal account
prevents us from affirming that
\/x(x is six meters from a rhododendron -? [py.y is six meters

from a rhododendron]:*;)
for example, though smoothly to tell us the consequences

the account works
of such affirmations. It is this feature
that prompted the description of the
account as providing us with away of registering that a property is intrinsic:
-
grounds for the correctness of such claims other than in such special cases
as that of identity, inwhich (the right) logic will give us the answer?must be
sought elsewhere. (Compare the case of probability theory, which does not
?except in extreme cases inwhich, again, essentially logical considerations
determine the values-tell us the probabilities of anything: only the ways in
which certain probability assignments determine or constrain others.)
Rather than proposing a theory of intrinsicness, then, Dunn should be
be seen as proposing a suitable logical environment for such theorising.
The role played by sympathetic citation of Moore (1922) is as setting up
the desideratum, not that the relevant predication account should deliver
Moore's verdicts on intrinsicness, but that it should make room for them.
Compare, in this light, Dunn's toying with the idea (1987, p. 358) that
while it is (in some sense) a "property of me that I am thinking of Reagan,
it is still not a property of Reagan that I am thinking of him". This example
introduces 'intentional object' issues which we would do well to avoid
(it being anything but clear that 'thinks of stands for a relation), so let
us change 'thinking of to 'watching', which we may abbreviate to 'W\
Dunn's relevant predication apparatus provides us with a way of distin
guishing two ways of strengthening the claim thatWab, since there are two
positions on which to perform p-abstraction: and [px.Wax]b;
[px.Wxb)a
with a as Dunn and b as Reagan, then the point of the remark just quoted
(with the modification to 'watching' ) is that the first but not the second is
true when Wab is true. And the point of citing this example here is that
the property of being an x such that x iswatching Reagan is not an interior
property, beingneither purely qualitative (at least if this is understood as
meaning 'Lewis-intrinsic', since, supposing Dunn to be watching Reagan,
not all duplicates of Dunn will share this property47) nor 'impurely intrin
sic'(Reagan being 'wholly distinct' from Dunn). So it is not as though
Dunn is concerned to restrict the applications of his apparatus to those
suggested in the passage quoted above from Moore (1922).

The preceding example provides an occasion for making three final
observations, which, however, readers not especially interested in relevant
predication can skip over (passing to the final paragraph of this section),
since this topic will not come up in Section 5. The first of these con
cerns Geach's idea (mentioned in the Introduction) of 'merely Cambridge'
change. When Dunn stops watching Reagan, Reagan's ceasing to be watch
ed by Dunn appears to qualify as such a change in Reagan, whereas Dunn
is the subject (in virtue of this same cessation) of a genuine change. This
is consilient with the choice of [px.Wxb]a rather than [px.Wax]b as the
correct relevant predication. But if we take genuine change as acquisition
or loss of a 'genuine' property, then whether or not relevant predication is
the way to register genuine property possession, the points at the end of
the last paragraph (and note 47) tell against identifying genuineness with
any of the notions of intrinsicness we have been exploring.
The second observation that deserves to be made is over the consid
erable discontinuity there is between the original example of irrelevant
predication, that of Reagan's being such that Socrates was wise (Reagan's
being Socwise, as we put it), and this latest example, of Reagan's being
such that Dunn is watching him. Socwisdom is a possessor-independent
property: if anything has it, everything must. Not so, of course, with the
property of being watched by Dunn. In the former case, a zero-place
predicate (a sentence, that is) is converted into a one-place predicate by
what we might call 'spurious padding'. We could think of the one-place
predicate in question as being introduced by a definition: Socwise(x) iff
Socrates is wise.48 The analogous procedure at one level up (in terms of
number of argument places) would be to define a two-place predicate sym
bol 'Red*' by: Red*(x,y) iffRed(y).49 Having spuriously padded in the
variable V here, we arrive at the analogue of possessor-independence: for
any given choice of y, whether or not Red*(x, y) does not depend on the
choice of x. And again, the inference from Red(fe) to the relevant predica
tion [px.Red*(x, b)]a simply involves irrelevance at the sentential level, to

obtain:
=
Red(ft)->(z a->Red(6))
on the way to replacing this by
= a->Red*
Red(6)->(a; (#,&))
and appending a universal quantifier to the (main) consequent. This is all in

line with the motivation supplied by the original example about Socrates:
on the hypothesis that b is red, the identity of an individual is irrelevant
to the question of whether that individual bears the Red* relation to b.
The case, to repeat, of 6's being watched by a is not much like this: one
would have thought an arbitrary individual's identity with bwas anything
but irrelevant to drawing the conclusion that that individual was being
watched by a.
Thirdly, we should mention a kind of case in some respects intermediate
between that of the original 'such that Socrates iswise' case and the recent
example is that in which each of two monadic predicates F

[px.Wxb]a
and G is of a kind that determines relevant properties and we consider,
as a complex binary predicate the open formula Fx & Gy. Such &
representable relations are not (in general) 'relevant relations' between

x and y, in the sense that it does not follow (in R) from the assumptions
just made that
= =
{Fa&Gb)-*\/x(x a^My(y b-*Fx&Gy)),
but it does follow that
= =
(Fa&Gb)-rVxVy((x a&y b)^(Fx&Gy)),
which Dunn (1987) puts by saying that the predicate in question is of a

kind to determine relevant properties of pairs.50 Now, suppose (to use the
terminology of Section 2) we place-fix the second variable in our open
formula to b, getting a one-place predicate Fx & Gb. From the above
assumptipns concerning F and G, it does not follow that this predicate is

of a kind to determine a relevant property of x: all we can infer is that
Mz(z
=
x^Fx) & Gb, not the (in R) stronger \/z(z = x^(Fx&Gb)).
This is a result very much to be welcomed fromthe point of view of
applications to 'merely Cambridge' change, since one way for a to stop
satisfying the predicate Fx & Gb is for b to cease to be G, even though

a continues to be F: a 'merely Cambridge' change if ever there was one.
(One such example, due to Fiodor, is discussed inDunn (1990c); the first
occurrence in print of the observation that such predicates provide a source
of merely Cambridge change may well be inBealer (1982), p. 178, lines
11?12.) This is intermediate
between the original example and the Reagan
watching example in the following respect in particular: as in the latter
example, we are not dealing here with a possessor-independent property

(only the things which are F can satisfy Fx & Gb), and as in the former,
we can locate a specific inference which would have led to the conclusion
that the property would be relevantly possessed by all its possessors, and
which is blocked by the tighter controls on inference afforded by relevant
logic.
Applications, such as that illustrated by the [px.Wxb]a example, of
the (still, it is fair to say, experimental) relevant predication approach to
intrinsicness will not concern us further, though a quotation from Dunn
will open our concluding section. The main point to have gleaned from
?
the present section is simply that that there is a distinction clear enough
to on -
intuitively be going with, though deserving further elaboration
between intrinsic properties in the sense of purely qualitative properties,
and intrinsic properties in the more inclusive sense of interior properties.
5. TYINGUP SOMELOOSEENDS
From amongst the informal considerations aired in Dunn (1990a), we

extracted two objections against Lewis' account of intrinsicness. Objection
(a) complained that being (identity with) a given individual came out
extrinsic, have. Moore
and shouldn't (1922) went further and noticed that
not only being, but also being a part of, a given individual should come
out in some sense as intrinsic. Accordingly, we isolated the notion of
interiority, and went on to contrast this with Lewis-intrinsicness, arguing
that both notions deserved recognition, one being the idea of intrinsicness
as a matter of how things are within the confines of an object, the other
as the idea of the purely qualitative features of an object. We can usefully
draw together some of the themes of the preceding sections by focussing
on Dunn's Objection (/?), to the effect that being a duplicate of a given
individual came out intrinsic on Lewis' account, but shouldn't have. Part
of the way through a note appended to this discussion (note 7 of Dunn
(1990a, p. 203), we find the following very suggestive remarks:
Incidentally, Lewis in conversation has responded to my complaint that being a perfect
duplicate ofb turns out to be an intrinsic property on his account. As best as I can recall his
reply, he thinks that this is perfectly fine. Although the property is identifiedwith reference
to b, in itself it amounts to only an infinite conjunction of intrinsic properties of a, and
hence is itself intrinsic.

There are subtle issues about properties here, but I am tempted to
think that there are two "properties": the one that Lewis talks about, and which is intrinsic;
but also another relational one that I had in mind, and which is not (even though it should
be on Lewis' criterion), (p. 203)
There are indeed 'subtle issues

about properties' involved here. At first
sight, this particular subtlety may seem familiar, at least to readers of Jack
son, Pargetter and Prior (1982) or Prior, Pargetter, and Jackson (1982).51
To take an example from the former paper, we distinguish the property of
being the property of having the colour of ripe tomatoes, on the
red from
grounds that in a world inwhich ripe tomatoes were purple but rubies were
red, rubies would have the former property and lack the latter. According
to Jackson and his coauthors, we have to distinguish the following pair of
terms 'the property of having the colour of ripe tomatoes' and 'the colour of
ripe tomatoes'. The former rigidly designates a certain property- a certain

relational property in fact, which we might revealingly describe different
as the of ?
ly property being same-coloured-with ripe tomatoes whereas
the latter non-rigidly designates a non-relational property, the property of
being red.52 If this is right, then itwould be wrong to say that 'having the
?
colour of ripe tomatoes' picks out an intrinsic property namely, redness
- to
but happens identify this property by reference to ripe tomatoes. Now,
if one thought this was analogous to the case described in Dunn's note,
quoted above, and agreed with Jackson and friends, then one would think
that Lewis (as recollected by Dunn) had made a mistake. Being a duplicate
of b is one thing, and having intrinsic properties P\, P2,... is another. In
? one ?
just the same way would think that being the same height as the
Eiffel Tower was one property, and being n meters in height (where this
is how high the Eiffel Tower is) is another property. (We vary the toma
toes example here for the sake of involving a particular individual, as b is
involved in being a duplicate ofb.)
Any such appearance of d?j? vu would, however, be deceptive. The
analogy fails at the crucial point. The reason we have to deny (according
to Jackson) that being the same height as the Eiffel tower isn't the same
property as being n metres high, is that something could, in another world,
have either of these properties without having the other. There is the usual
complication in comparing this way of putting the point with the way it
would to be put for Lewis,
have since we are here thinking of something in
another world as having the same height (^ n metres) as the Eiffel tower
has in thatworld, andLewis does not believe that theEiffel tower (literally)
exists at that other world: so we should
express the idea, by saying that
something in that world has the same height as a counterpart of the Eiffel
Tower in that world. Having seen how to make the translation, ifwe should
wish to, let us continue to speak in the non-Lewis way. Now the disanalogy
between the case of being the same height as the Eiffel Tower and being a
-
duplicate of b, is that whereas it is not true and this was what motivated
?
the claim of property-distinctness that in any world the properties of
having the same height as the Eiffel Tower and having a height of n metres
are possessed by the same individuals, it is true that in any world, the
properties of being a duplicate of b and of having the envisaged intrinsic
properties P\, Pi,... are possessed by the same individuals.
Well, this last statement awkwardly combines both the Lewis and the
non-Lewis way of speaking (cf. note 25). For when we speak of being
a duplicate of b, we are thinking of b as an object existing in one rather
than several possible worlds. After all, if b exists (contra Lewis) in several
worlds, 6's qualitative properties may differ from world to world, and the
notion of sharing 6's intrinsic properties (being a duplicate of b) becomes
ill-defined: which set of intrinsic
properties? So to have the Eiffel Tower
example and the duplication-of-6 example formulated in parallel terms, for
the sake of a proper comparison, we should really think of each of the
? - to one world, or else
crucial objects b, and the Eiffel Tower confined
allow both to exist in several worlds. If we go the latter way, we shall have
to reformulate claims like 'a is a duplicate of 6' which involve a binary
relation between world-boundindividuals, to claims involving a four-place
relation, along the lines of
'a in w\ is a duplicate of b in w?. This would
amount to: the intrinsic properties that a possesses in w\ are the same as
the intrinsic properties possessed by b in wi.
Once we do this, however, the Eiffel Tower example reveals some
hidden complexities. When we thought: Yes, it is possible for something
to have the same height as the Eiffel Tower without having the height n
metres, we were envisaging a world W2 inwhich something had in W2 the
same height as the Eiffel Tower had in W2. Let's call the actual world ?
inwhich we supposed the Eiffel Tower was n meters ?
the world in height
w\. The above four place relation that was introduced to make duplication
claims have a definite sense once we allowed non-world-bound individuals
has an analogue here too of course. A fair analogue of b in u>2's being a
duplicate of a in w\ would be: something's having in W2 the height that

the Eiffel Tower has in w\. Let's be more specific about the 'something',
and suppose what we have in mind is a certain tree we will call Old
Red. 'OldRed might have been the same height as the Eiffel Tower' is
ambiguous. It could mean that there is a world in which Old Red and the
Eiffel Tower have the same height. This is the reading encouraged by the
way the examples are discussed by Jackson et al. But there is also a reading
corresponding to the claim that there exists a world W2 such that Old Red
has in W2 the same height that the Eiffel Tower has in (not W2, but) w\.
We can force this reading by rephrasing the sentence to: 'Old Red might
have been the same height as the Eiffel Tower actually is.' Similarly,
in the
case of the ripe tomatoes, we should add to our list of property-designating
expressions:
(i) theproperty of being red

(ii) the property of being the same colour as ripe tomatoes
this last being understood as by Jackson et al., the following
(iii) the property of being the same colour as ripe tomatoes actually
are
Note that in any world, something has this last property iff it is red. So
if property identity goes by necessary coextensiveness, the newly added
third property-designating expression designates the same property as the
first on our list. Similarly, if this is how we individuate properties, then the
property of being the same height as the Eiffel Tower actually is and the
property of being n metres in height are one and the same property.
So, to sum up this little bit of discussion, what we have is this. We
cannot say that being a duplicate of b and having Pi (etc.) are different
properties on the grounds on which Jackson et al. say that being the colour
of ripe tomatoes and being red are different properties. For those grounds
were: of necessary
failure coextensiveness. When we notice that to get the
duplication talk into the same metaphysical idiom as the talk of tomatoes
(or the Eiffel Tower), we have to fix aworld as a 'base world' for duplication
statements?a such that it is the intrinsic properties of ft in that world
world
?
that matter for claims that some object is a duplicate of b and when
we do the precisely analogous thing in the case of the tomatoes, etc., as
above by inserting an 'actually' we lose the reason that we previously
had for talk of different properties: now, the properties are necessarily
coextensive. (This last claim may seem a little implausible: how can the
insertion of the word 'actually' make such a difference? See Davies and
Humberstone (1980) to get a feel for what is going on, as well as for
substantiation of the following claim.) Although it is necessarily the case
that something has the height theEiffel Tower actually has iff it isn metres
in height, is is not a priori (knowable) that that something has the height
the Eiffel Tower actually has iff it is n metres in height. Here for the
first time in our discussion, it turns out to matter whether properties are
individuated by necessary coextensiveness or by a priori coextensiveness.
The former method of individuation is suitable for some purposes; the
-
latter probably needs beefing up to be suitable for others it is probably
useful not to consider apriority by itself, but in conjunction with necessity.

For the moment, let us leave open the question of whether we need a
conception of properties with precisely that degree (a priori and necessary
coextensiveness) of fineness.
A question by no means left open by the consideration of earlier sections
is whether or not we need at least two conceptions of property. Let us say
that being F and being G are the same property, when the predicates F and
G here are conceptually equivalent, to use Johnston's phrase, and that being
F and being G are the same propertyn when these predicates are necessarily
coextensive. These subscripted labels are not very memorable, and we
might have used, e.g., 'property-concept' for propertiesc and 'attribute' for
propertiesn, had it not been for the fact that presently a third conception
will enter
the picture, and the subscripts provide a better way of keeping
comparative track of the three notions of property. Of course, there is

nothing new in proposing that there are two important conceptions of
property more or less along the lines of the two just distinguished. They
correspond roughly to the 'predicates' and 'physical properties' of Putnam
(1969), and, somewhat more roughly to the 'concepts' and 'qualities'
of Bealer (1982). (The latter correspondence is rougher because Bealer
is very selective about what counts as a quality, so that we have here
not propertiesn in general but something like Lewis' 'perfectly natural'
propertiesn, as described in note 27.)
Now, itwas argued in Section 2 that the relational/non-relational distinc
tion amongst properties was a distinction amongst propertiesc. By contrast,
in Section 3, we saw that various intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions (tagged by
prefixes 'Lewis-', 'Kim-', 'Kim+-') could be drawn as distinctions between
- ?
what we are now calling propertiesn. By way of further elaboration:
in Section 2 we saw that the best way to characterize the relationality of a
property, or the impurity of a relational property, was to say inwhat having
that property but this is essentially
consisted: a matter of charting con
ceptual connexions, and conceptual connexions (in an appropriately tight

sense) do not obtain between propertiesn. Their domain is propertiesc,
? near ? senses of predicates,
which, being enough the (Fregean) have
conceptual structure built into them. On the other hand the 'pure qualita
tiveness' notion(s) of intrinsicness are a matter of propertiesn. The reason
here is that the best way of approaching this notion is via variations on
Lewis' intrinsicness/duplication interdefinabilities, and no account in this
spirit slices more finely than the distribution of properties across possible
worlds; the properties which are sliced that way are propertiesn. As for the
interior/non-interior distinction of Section 4, we saw some pressure (the
talk of 'impure intrinsicness') to regard this as a distinction on a par with
the non-relational/relational distinction, and hence as a distinction between

propertiesc, but we also saw some pressure in the opposite direction (e.g.,
coming from wanting to regard the purely qualitative properties as a sub
species of the class of interior properties). That would make interiority

a matter of propertiesn. But, either way, we get no grounds for a third
conception of property.
Those grounds come instead from the discussion in this section, with
the examples of the Eiffel Tower, the ripe tomatoes, and that (from Dunn's
discussion) of being a perfect duplicate of b. The complexity of these
examples suggests our third conception: being F and being G are the same
if it is both necessary a
and priori that the predicates F and G
propertynap
are coextensive. We can illustrate its possible application with the tomatoes
example, so let us repeat here the crucial list:
(i) (theproperty of) being red

(ii) (theproperty of) being the same colour as ripe tomatoes
(iii) (theproperty of) being the same colour as ripe tomatoes actually
are
Now as we saw (i) and (ii) do not pick out the same propertyn, but (i) and
(iii) do. Further, (i), (ii), and (iii) all pick out distinct propertiesc. So how
we seem ?
are we to draw the distinction to want and Dunn very much
case of having P\ etc. vs. being a duplicate ?
wanted, in the parallel of ft
between (i) and (iii)?Well, we can say that (i) and (iii) pick out different
propertiesnap.
By way of further illustration of how the threefold distinction between
conceptions property works: Being full of water and being full of H2O
(Kripke 1972) are the same propertyn but not the same propertynap (let
alone the same propertyc). Being triangular and being trilateral (to pick up
an example from Section 2) are the same propertynap, and so afortiori the
same propertyn, but not the same propertyc. (This phrasing is not intended
to suggest, literally, that some entity is the same propertyn but not the same
propertyc as some entity. Rather, what we normally think of as property
names exhibit a certain systematic ambiguity, depending as whether they
are taken as names of propertiesc, or propertiesn.)
propertiesnap,
There is an obvious parallel to this threefold distinction between notions
of property, in the realm of propositions. On one usage, two sentences
express the same proposition if they are necessarily equivalent, or, to put
it another way, are true in the same worlds. Adapting the above sub
scripting conventions, we would say that these sentences express the same
proposition^ For some such pair of sentences, no amount of reflection by
an ideally rational being who understood them would reveal them to stand
in this relation. Although necessarily equivalent, this equivalence remains

an a posteriori matter. They do not express the same for
propositionnap,
which it is required that they not only necessarily, but also a priori know
ably, take the same truth-value. Finally, since a less than ideally rational
('logically omniscient', as it is sometimes put) being might understand the
sentences, and believe that one was true without believing that the other
was, to the extent that belief is a propositional attitude, its objects had
better be propositionsc (roughly: what Frege called thoughts, the senses of
sentences).
The interesting question here is not whether there is a legitimate indi
-
viduation policy for properties recorded in the 'nap' conception for
-
plainly there is but rather whether invoking that conception is the most
perspicuous way of accommodating themultiplicity exhibited by (i)-(iii).

The reason given above for invoking it in this connexion was actually a non
sequitur. from the fact that neither two-fold distinction by itself 'can make
sufficiently many divisions amongst (i)?(iii) to keep them all distinct, we
should not conclude that a further conception of properties is called for,
since we can do justice to the multiplicity of (i)?(iii) by making simulta
neous use of both distinctions. For we can say that (i) and (iii) are alike
in picking out intrinsic properties^ (in fact, the same intrinsic property^),
while (ii) and (iii) are alike in picking out relational propertiesc (most
plausibly, in this case, distinct such prbpertiesc). So we can conclude by
agreeing with (at least the letter of) Dunn's remark, quoted at the start
of this section, that, in the case of being a duplicate ofb "there are two
'properties': the one that Lewis talks about, and which is intrinsic; but
also another relational one that I had in mind, and which is not". The
only thing wrong here is the supposition that relationality and intrinsicness
are in competition in some one arena of properties. There are certainly
two propertiesc, one of which is relational and the other of which is non
relational; but there is only one propertyn, and it is intrinsic. Thus we can
also agree with the view attributed by Dunn to Lewis in the same passage,
as long as we read 'the property' as 'the propertyn': "Although the prop
erty is identified with reference to ft, in itself it amounts to only an infinite
conjunction of intrinsic properties of a, and hence is itself intrinsic." Since
- - a
how a property n is identified is in this case matter of what sense of a
predicate has, we have no conflict with the other view just endorsed to the
fact that the propertyc in question is relational.53
We have suggested that while the natural habitat of the relational/non
relational distinction is the domain of propertiesc, the natural habitat of the
intrinsic/extrinsic distinction(s) is the domain of propertiesn. When one
asks whether a property is relational, one is to be understood in the first
instance as asking this question about a propertyc, whereas when one asks
whether a property is (say, Lewis-)intrinsic, one is best taken as asking, in
the first instance, after the status of some propertyn. Now the insertion of
the words 'in the first instance' here is intended as a reminder that some
distinctions can survive perfectly well when transposed out of their natural
habitat: when they are applied derivatively, that is, in a domain other than
that on which they were originally defined. For example, the classification
of British soccer teams (at any given time) into First Division, Second
Division, etc., induces a classification amongst the members of such teams,
into First Division players, Second Division players, etc. What is needed for
unproblematic derivative applications of the 'Division' distinction is that
each player plays for (one and) only one team: the player then inherits the
category applying ('in the first instance') to the team in question. Similarly,
since each propertyc determines a unique propertyn, any classification of
propertiesn induces a derivative classification of propertiesc. In particular,
then, we can make sense of a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic
drawn at the level of properties^ applied instead to propertiesc: an intrinsic
property c is one whose associated propertyn is intrinsic in the original

sense. The reverse process is not possible, since a given propertyn will be
the propertyn determined by several distinct propertiesc: so we cannot ask
about the status as relational or non-relational of a property , any more
than we can ask what the eye-colour of a football team is.
We will close with two examples of the kind of transference described.
Its most obvious application is to the suggestion that interior properties
include purely qualitative properties as well as (in Langton's phrase)
impure intrinsic properties. In Section 3 we worried about this phrase,
on the grounds that (putting the point in the terminology of the present
? as ?
section) pure qualitativeness explicated, say, Lewis-intrinsicness is
a feature of properties ,whereas impurity, like relationality in general,
is a matter of propertiesc. Whatever the eventual fate of the suggestion,
we can at least meet the worry about syllepsis: since intrinsicness can be
transferred from the coarser to the finer conception of properties, 'impure
ly intrinsic' has a perfectly coherent application to propertiesc, namely to
those propertiesc which are impure relational propertiesc but determine
intrinsic properties .
For our second example we pick up a recurrent subtheme of the preced
ing discussion: dispositional properties. Like relationality, dispositionality
is a feature of propertiesc. For to say that a property is dispositional is to
say something about what having that property consists in. On a slightly
oversimplified version of the subjunctive conditional account, for example,
to say that the property F is a dispositional property is to say that there are
(possibly relational) properties G and H such that x's having the property
F consists in x 'sbeing such that x would have property H if x had property
G. We should note in passing that a mere a priori equivalence is not to
? or
the point here all properties would have to be reckoned dispositional.
An example (due to D. H. Mellor) making this point is discussed in terms
highly congenial to the present approach by Prior (1982): something is tri
angular if and only if it is such that were its angles to be correctly counted,
the count would come to three. We may paraphrase Prior's comment on
the suggestion that the a priori truth of this biconditional in the present
terminology thus: being triangular does not consist in being such as to sat
isfy the counterfactual open formula here; rather, being triangular consists
(inter alia) in having three angles, and it is in virtue of this that a count
reaching the number three qualifies as correct. (Note the similarity with
Karmo's example.)
Now, we want to say that some dispositional properties are intrin
sic (Kim+-instrinsic, to be specific), even though is, as
dispositionality
we have just seen, at home at the level of propertiesc whereas intrin
sic/extrinsic distinctions cut no more finely than at the level of individua
tion for properties .Transference to the rescue: we can say that a predicate
picks out a dispositional but intrinsic property and mean that the propertyc
it determines is dispositional while the property which it determines via
this propertyc is intrinsic.54
NOTES
1
Ellis (1991), Section 3.
2
This notion of reducibility can be found, for example, in Bennett (1971, p. 253); ifwe
require the entailment to hold in both directions between the relational claim and the con
-
junction of monadic predications which of course would not be correct for the taller than
-
relation then we have what in Section 2 will be called an 4&-representable' relation.
3
By 'the envisaged change' is meant here a's coming to be taller than b; an alternative
response to this example, which (along with several further references to the literature on
Cambridge change) may be found in Schlesinger (1990) would reinstate the line of thought
in the prevous paragraph by simply denying that, even in the case inwhich a comes to be
taller than b by growing (rather than by 6's shrinking), this remains a 'merely Cambridge'
change (though the change in intrinsic height properties in virtue of which this change
occurs is a genuine change). Settling this question would require getting more deeply
involved in the individuation of events thanwe need for themain body of the present paper,
though.
4
The suggestion of the preceding sentence certainly won't do as a general account; for
example, in the Xanthippe case, intrinsic properties of Socrates and Xanthippe do not,
taken together with his dying, entail that she becomes a widow.
5
In effect, the above is hidden from view in Khamara's
problem discussion, by a couple
of terminological moves which initially seem innocent enough. The first move ismade on
p. 144: "and from now on I shall omit

the qualification as the context will make
'positive',
it clear whether the term 'relational
properties' is meant to cover only the positive ones
or the positive as well as the negative ones". Next, a few lines down on the same page,
we have "And for the sake of convenience, we will henceforth use the term 'relation' to
mean a dyadic relation, and the term 'relational to mean a property a
property' involving
dyadic relation". It should be noted that these two remarks are already clouding matters,
unless by 'involving a dyadic relation' here, Khamara means: a dyadic relation
involving
in specifically themanner inwhich such a relation is involved inDefinition 1or Definition
1'). If the kind of 'involvement' evident in Definition 2 or 2' is also allowed, then the
two suggestions as to what 'relational property' is to ("henceforth") mean are in conflict:
according to the first quotation, this abbreviates 'positive relational property', and accord
ing to the second (on the present interpretation) it abbreviates 'positive relational property
or impure property'. Now this would be harmless if we had some assurance that all impure
properties were positive relational: but, as we have seen, such assurance is not easily come
by.When, finally, Khamara says (p. 145) "And by our second definition [=Definition2] all
impure properties are relational properties", there is a serious question as to what 'relational
is to mean. What certainly has not been shown to follow is that if a
properties' supposed
property has what it takes to be an impure property, then it has what it takes to be a positive
relational property.
6
This is in fact the definition offered inBennett (1971, p. 253), of what it is for P to be a
relational property.
7
We do not here pursue the possibility of drawing a local/global distinction such as that
mentioned in the Introduction for notions of intrinsicness in the present connexion; the
suggestion might be that the bearded barber has the property of shaving someone 'relation
ally', while the self-shaver has it 'non-relationally'.
8
This is called the 'pleonastic conception of properties' in Schiffer (1990). One possi
ble contrast is with a narrow conception according to which properties are ? or are in a
?
one-to-one correspondence with so-called universals, which are supposed by those who
theorize in terms of them to be wholly present in each of their instances, to be incapable
of existing unless and to ground
instantiated, the judgments of similarity between things
which play an explanatory role in science. See Lewis (1983b) for discussion and references;
the 'perfectly natural' properties mentioned in note 27 below provide Lewis' alternative
conceptualization of this narrower notion of property.

9
As inBealer (1982, 1989).
10
In working through similar material in classes, I have encountered an interesting misun
with a conjunctive version of such examples as that in the text. Take
derstanding, especially
the property of admiring both Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth II. Some students
feel that this is a straightforward case of an impure relational property by (D2), taking the
- ?
relation of admiring as R therein on the grounds that and here's the mistake since the
existential quantifier '3y' only means that there is at least one individual y such that having
the property amounts to admiring y, this allows for the possibility that theremay be more
than one: in our case, Princess Margaret and also Elizabeth II. One has to point out that for
neither of these individuals, let alone for both, does having the property amount to admiring
that individual, since in neither case is such admiration sufficient.
1*
We need not enter into a discussion of the further question as to whether the relational
property thus derived is pure or impure: an answer here depends on one's account of such
natural kind mass terms as 'water'. More significant for the present investigation is whether
all dispositional properties should be reckoned relational. In the case of solubility, the 'test'
predicate ('immersed in') is dyadic while the 'manifestation' predicate ('dissolves') is not,
unless is to be taken as elliptical

this for 'dissolves in (the solvent in question)'. What if
neither predicate is relational, as in the property of being an x such that x would shrink if
x got wet? Here there is no reason to describe the dispositional property as relational.
12
Fine (1977) has an extensive discussion of how to extend the pure/impure distinction to
entities of various types (including propositions) in terms of automorphisms of (Kripke-)
models for a modal language, but he has to begin with the assumption (p. 147) that the
relation symbols of that language all stand for 'purely qualitative' relations (and indeed
that no such relations go unexpressed). So, as with explications in the style of Khamara and
Loux, an unanalyzed residue of the pure/impure contrast remains.

13
Actually, we don't need to invokeGod's knowledge of the identity statement; it is enough
to note that ifGod (or anyone else) knows that 6 has P, then itmust be true that b has P,
?
so and here we simply invoke the truth of the identity statement, not its being known by
?
anyone since b is b', b' has P, in which case God (by the omniscience assumption) knows
that b' has P.
14
So interpreted, this doctrine is easily refuted, since it is easily checked that ifR is&
representable, then R satisfies the following (first-order) condition of'forgetful transitivity',
evidently not satisfied by all R:
VxVyVuVz((Rxy&Ruz)-^Rxz)
(Note that setting y = u gives the usual notion of transitivity for a binary relation: what we
have done is to 'forget about' thus securing a middle term.) In fact a relation satisfies this
condition if and only if it is&-representable, as is shown inHumberstone (1984).
15
God may not count as a 'concrete particular', if that is taken as requiring having a spatial
position, but presumably few theists would think of God as an abstract entity. Admittedly,
there are many problems about drawing any (single) abstract/concrete distinction; see 1.7
of Lewis (1986).
16
It would be good to know more about the contrast
invoked, here
and about the general
issue of
'indexing', to which
my attention was
by drawn
Richard Holton, who discusses
the case with which Crane is especially concerned, in an unpublished paper.
17
By 'necessarily coextensive' is here meant: necessarily possessed by the same things; and
likewise, mutatis mutandis, for 'apriori coextensive'. Strictly, no doubt, one should reserve
talk of coextensiveness for predicates, and use a different term in the case of properties.
18
An example, at a 'meta-level' with respect to the cases with which we are concerned,
is afforded by the interdefinability of intrinsicness and duplication in Lewis (1983a); we
will get to this in Section 3. A striking exception to this consensus claimed in the text is
Wierzbicka (1972); see also Chapter 1of her (1980).
19
The definitions which follow are contrasted inAnderson and Belnap (1975, p. 432), to
make a point about (Parry's) analytic implication. An application of the example similar to
thatmade here may be found inChisholm (1989), Chapter 15 of which?where the relevant
?
discussion appears is called 'Properties and States of Affairs Intentionally Considered'.
Chisholm proposes that properties P and Q are identical when P and Q "include and
involve each other" (p. 145). In saying P includes Q, Chisholm means thatwhatever has
property P must have property Q, and by 'P involves Q' Chisholm means (p. 143) "P
-
is necessarily such that whoever conceives it conceives Q". The upshot is quite close to
though not exactly the same as (for reasons that need not detain us)-the proposal advocated
below of identifying properties with concepts, for present purposes.
20
In Peacocke (1983, p. 30), we read:
We can say that concept A is definitionally prior to concept B iff B can be defined illumi
natingly in a certain respect in terms of A.
Because we have here 'can' rather than 'can only' (or 'must'), this gives a concept analogous
to the existential, rather than the universal, derelativization considered above. (Analogous
to- not identical with - because ithas not been required that the concepts A and B apply to
the same things.) One thing that is odd about this is that the following two statements are
then consistent: 'A is definitionally prior to B', 'B is definitionally prior toA'. This goes
against expectations towhich any talk of priority gives rise.
21
The account
present of concepts as carrying inherent structure is very similar to, if not
identical the neo-Fregean
with, view of senses to be seen, for example, in Part II of Peacocke
(1983). (Of course this is not Frege's own use of the term (translated as) 'concept', which
was for the referents, rather than the senses of predicates.) It is also what Bealer (1982)
calls the 'second conception' of 'intensional entities'. "On conception 2, each definable
intensional entity is such thatwhen it is defined completely, it has a unique non-circular
definition" (p. 64).
22
Johnston goes on to use this relation in formulating a thesis about what is potentially
explanatory of what. Our present interest is not in any symmetric relation such as conceptual
equivalence as here understood, but in the asymmetric 'consists in' construction. At a later
point in his paper, Johnston has occasion to consider such an asymmetric construction,
as deployed in Wright 1989, namely '... constitutes_'. What Johnston says is that
"Wright seems to accept something like this conclusion when he says that subjects in
appropriate conditions who believe that pigs fly and believe that they believe this do not
believe that they believe that pigs fly as a result of a 'cognitive achievement', since under
those conditions believing that pigs fly is 'constituted' by believing that one believes that
pigs fly. Talk of constitution is inmany ways inappropriate. First... one might as well say
that under those conditions one's believing that one believes that pigs fly is constituted by
"
one's believing that pigs fly... From the point of our investigations, if we understand 'is
constituted by' to amount to 'consists in', then what Johnston offers here is what we must
say, since a conceptual content cannot in something

consist of which it is a proper part.
23
A more controversial example, in view of
the opposition in some quarters to treating
existence as a property and identity as a relation, is provided by the claim that existence is a
non-relational property, under that description, though under the description 'the property
of being self-identical', it is a relational property.
24
See the papers on action inDavidson (1980).
25
Individual variables here are taken as ranging over all possible objects, rather than all
actual objects, so that the conditional and biconditional appearing in these definitions are to
be understood materially. Further the definitions are best understood against the background
of Lewis' general modal theorizing, which incorporates the following two features, aside
-
from his well-known 'modal realism' the view that possible but non-actual worlds are
no less real than the actual world: (1) no object exists inmore than one world, and claims
about what might have happened but did not happen to an object are interpreted as claims
about what happens to 'counterparts' ofthat object in other worlds; (2) a property is a set
of possible objects. View (2) here depends for its availability on adopting view (1). The
usual way of thinking of properties in possible worlds terms is quite different; it allows
objects to exist in different worlds, and treats a property as a function from worlds to sets
of objects: the property P is that function which assigns to any world the set of things in
thatworld which in thatworld have P. On this view itwould not make sense to just ask
whether a possible object has the property P, since a single may possess P in w\
object
but lack it in u)2. But on Lewis' view, the sameobject isn't going to belong to the domain
of W[ and also of the distinct world wi, so the problem does riot arise, and he can afford to
- -
think of a possible object as once and for all either having or lacking the property, and
therefore to identify the property with the class of possible objects possessing it. See Lewis
(1986) for many more details and arguments on this and related matters. Whichever way
we interpret modal language in possible worlds terms, Lewis' way or the more orthodox
way, the upshot is that necessarily co-extensive predicates pick out the same property. For
the sake, especially of Sections 4 and 5 below, the same work by Lewis should be consulted
for the distinction between counterparts and duplicates. Although both notions are defined
in terms of similarity, the similarities that matter, as well as the way they matter, are quite
different in the two cases.
26
'Disjunctive properties' is in scare quotes because all we really have is properties
disjunctively specified (on this or that occasion). Whatever may be said for the notion
of properties that figured in Section 2, there is no non-trivial disjuctive/non-disjunctive
distinction amongst properties, understood in the way appropriate to the present section,
any more that (in general) some classes are 'uniony' and others not. It still makes sense to
speak, however, of the disjunction of two properties, for the same reasons as itmakes sense
to speak of the union of two classes.
27
This phrase is actually taken from Lewis (1983b, p. 355). In that paper, Lewis provides
a something of a break-in of his own, via the notion of 'perfectly natural properties',
which are the that make for genuine resemblances between their instances. If
properties
this notion is taken as intelligible, then duplication can be defined as agreement in respect
of such properties, and the intrinsic properties, defined as for above, emerge as
Intr(P)
comprising the class of properties supervenient on the class of perfectly natural properties.
Thus for example, if we have perfectly natural properties P and Q, the property of having
P or having Q will typically not be perfectly natural (e.g., ifP andQ are specific values of
unrelated physical magnitudes), but it is guaranteed to be intrinsic, since objects differing
over its possession must differ over one of the perfectly natural P, Q. Relative to the above
system of definitions, we can use the terminology of Section 2 to draw a distinction: while x
is a duplicate of y iff x and y agree w.r.t. all perfectly natural properties, and x is a duplicate
of y iff x and y agree w.r.t. all intrinsic properties, in only the first case is a 'consists in'
reformulation in order: x and t/'s being duplicates consists in their agreement on perfectly
natural properties.
28
In fact, on Lewis' view, especially as urged in Lewis (1986), a possible worldy'asi is what
he here calls a lonely object.
29
As we may (curved space or not) ifwe understand 'x is six metres away from y' to mean
that the shortest distance from x to y is six metres.
30
The quoted passage is arguably ambiguous. The parenthetical 'more important' is to be
interpreted as saying that intrinsic properties are more than extrinsic

important properties,
rather than that what are left are the 'more important' from amongst the intrinsic properties.
31
Though the present concept of unconditional extrinsicness arises in Lewis 1983a, it
can easily be characterized in terms of some apparatus from note 16 of Lewis 1983b.
There one finds a fourfold classification of extrinsic properties depending on what they
do (include, exclude, or divide) to all the blocks of the partition induced by the relation
of duplication amongst possibilia. Class (1) consists of those that divide each such block;
Lewis calls them purely extrinsic. The remaining three types of case are: (2) those that
divide some blocks, include some, and exclude none; (3) those that divide some, exclude
some, and include none; (4) those that divide some, include some, and exclude some.
Lewis provides characterizations of (2)-(4) in terms of boolean combinations of class (1)
properties and intrinsic properties; for example, that those in class (3) are obtainable by
conjunction (intersection) of a purely extrinsic property with an intrinsic property. Now
the unconditionally extrinsic properties, being those extrinsic each instance of
properties
which has a duplicate non-instance are those which include no block of the partition, since
to include a block is to be possessed by all elements of the block, which means that these
elements lack duplicates without the property. Thus, the unconditionally extrinsic properties
(understood with themodification in the text) comprise the union of classes (1) and (3) of
the above taxonomy. Since these are, respectively, the pure extrinsics and the conjunctions
of a pure extrinsic with an intrinsic, the remark quoted above from Lewis, to the effect that
an intrinsic property cannot imply an unconditionally extrinsic property, may be seen as a
consequence of the fact that an intrinsic property cannot imply a pure extrinsic property, at
- ?
least on the further assumption that intrinsic property in question P, say is not empty.
For letQ be a purely extrinsic property supposedly (for a contradiction) implied by P,
and let a be an instance of P (an element of P, thought of as a class of possible objects
- we
can make this supposition about a because we are assuming P non-empty). Since P
is supposed to imply Q, a is an instance of Q. The block containing a (a's equivalence
class under the relation of duplication) is divided by Q, the latter being a purely extrinsic
property, so there is something, b, say, in this block which is not an instance of Q. Since
a and b are duplicates and P is intrinsic, however, b must be an instance of P: but b was
chosen as something which was not an instance of Q, contradicting the supposition that P
implies Q.
32
Or rather, the logically unpossessable property, since
such distinctions as occupied us
in Section 2 between distinct properties, each without
possible instances, are nullified on
-
Lewis' identification of properties with the classes of their instances and reasonably so,
too, since those finer distinction are not germane, as we shall emphasize in Section 5, to the
topic of the present

section. The 'unpossessable' property is just the empty class of possible
objects, for present purposes, whether picked out by an expression for a relational property
(in the sense of Section 2), such as 'the property of being six metres from a rhododendron
from which nothing is six metres away', or not, as with (we may suppose) 'the property of
being a round square'. In neither case could duplicates differ with respect to the property,
since all objects agree in lacking it. Therefore it counts as intrinsic, the relationality of the
former property-concept, notwithstanding.
33
Actually, this is a slight oversimplification, since Lewis believes that there are possible
individuals which do not exist in any possible world, namely mereological aggregates of
individuals from different worlds. We are also ignoring here the non-contingent individuals
like numbers which arguably do exist in more than one world.
34
As Lewis points out in the third paragraph of note 16 of his (1983b), on themost natural
reading of Slote (1967), the properties here classified as Kim-intrinsic are what Slote
called differential properties; in fact, Slote explicitly places solubility on a list of properties
which are 'clearly' differential. Ellis (1991) also counts the dispositional properties of
an individual as amongst its intrinsic properties, since (see the Introduction, above) it
- -
possesses them which is not to say it manifests them independently of external forces.
It is certainly an attractive feature of a notion of intrinsicness that it reckons (at least the
most familiarly cited examples of) dispositional properties as intrinsic.As Johnston (1989,
p. 141) remarks in the course of reviewing a dispositional account of colour concepts (to
which he does not himself subscribe), after noting that such an account is not subjectivist
or idealist about colour, "The colours of things are not existentially dependent upon our
responses. Rather, colour concepts are conceptually dependent upon the concepts of our
responses under certain conditions." The first sentence here means that the dispositional
predicates (supposing we take them to be such) do not pick out (in particular, what Lewis
was quoted above as calling positive) extrinsic properties, and the second, that they none
the less pick out what in Section 2 we concluded were relational properties.
35
The same example shows that the notion of Kim+-intrinsicness isolated below from
Kim's work also fails to coincide with internality.
36
Disregard problems about the tense on 'was' here; these are not relevant to the present
discussion.
37
As Lewis ( 1988, p. 14) says in relation to the similar question of characterizing the subject
matter(s) a statement,
on which it turns out that analytic and contradictory statements are
we should not expect
about subject matter.
every "Not to worry: distinctions of subject
matter to apply in any very intuitive way to analytic and contradictory statements, so we
may be content with whatever stipulation falls out of the definitions that work in the cases
that matter."
38
IfKim (1982b) is consulted, itwill be found to favour a certain 'inter-world' ('strong')
supervenience claim for the psychophysical case under discussion inKim (1982a), rather
than an 'intra-world' ('weak') supervenience claim: this involves a concomitant preference
for the notion of Kirn"1"-intrinsicness over Kim-instrinsicness for the of Kim
exegesis
(1982a).
39
Of course, in the case of an object that can be viewed as a container, what is inside
the object is not part of the object, and the present remarks are no longer to the point. We
take this opportunity to quote from p. 174 of Sprigge (1983) inwhich there is something
of an echo of Moore's remarks: "The third sort of non-standard property raises certain
itwould confuse the main issue to dwell on. They are, at least in some
puzzles which sense,
relational though not, on the face of it, matters of the thing which possesses
properties,
them being related to something 'outside itself. An example is the property of containing
London, shared by England, Britain, the UK, etc."
40
The terminology of 'purely qualitative' properties is not uncommon in the present
connexion (e.g., see Goldstick 1986) and is in any case suggested by the practice of calling
thingswhich are duplicates (in Lewis' sense) 'qualitatively identical'. (Cf also note 12.)One
possible danger is in associations and experience
of observation which the term 'quality'
may have (cf. "qualia"). As it happens,

(1922) Moore
objects to the proposed usage (p.
264f.), but on feeble grounds:
"Nobody would say that a very loud sound was exactly like
a very soft one, even if they were exactly alike in quality; and yet it is plain there is a
sense in which their intrinsic nature is different". The reply is that we should of course
count a difference in volume as a qualitative difference, ignoring for present purposes any
'qualitative' vs. 'quantitative' contrast; however, the shape/size contrast of the following
note is also relevant here. A second danger was pointed out by a Synthese referee, who
remarks that "as the expression 'purely qualitative' was introduced by Carnap and Hempel
a fairground' counts as a purely qualitative characterization even though
(...) 'abutting
the property of abutting a fairground is scarcely an interior one". In the terminology of the
present paper, what we have here is, rather, a pure relational property.
41
No doubt difficulties sometimes arise, especially in assessing duplication between non
world-mates: duplicates (of space-occupants) must have the same shape, but what about
the same sizel We normally think of both as intrinsic properties (or property-types), but
considerations of the kind aired indebates over the relational and absolute theories of space
may give us pause as we consider the transworld duplication relation in respect of a pair
of lonely spheres differing only in that one is a scaled-up version of the other. Even in the
case of shape itself, there is the problem of 'incongruent counterparts': are enantiomorphs
(world-mates or not) qualitative duplicates?

42
In conversation.
43 mere
A duplicate of a is only required to have a duplicate (not a counterpart) of b as a
part.
44
To avoid raising additional complications, pretend for the moment that no individual
has more than one counterpart in a world, and that the counterpart relation is (like the
duplication relation) symmetric.

45
As an alternative, modelled on the first of the absorption equivalents above, we can replace
the first ofthat formula's conjuncts by '(Socrates was wise ?> Fx) -> Fx\ which, though
not R-equivalent to the first conjunct, yields, when conjoined with the second conjunct, a
conjunction R-equivalent to that in the text. This eliminates the disjunction, and suggests
a technical question. Say that a logic has the dummying-in property when, for any formula
A and any sentence letter q, there is some formula B(q) containing q such thatA and B(q)
are equivalent according to the logic (i.e., interreplaceable salva provabilitate). Then the
absorption equivalences in the text show thatR has this property, since A and (e.g.) (A A q)
V A are equivalent, and the example in this note shows that the disjunction-free fragment
of Positive R also has the property. Then the technical question (which we conjecture has
a negative answer) is whether the pure implicational fragment of R has the dummying-in
property; since this logic is closed under Uniform Substitution, an affirmative answer is
correct iff for distinct sentence letters p and q, p both provably implies and is provably
implied by, some (one) formula inwhich q has at least one occurrence. (Obviously, in the
case of the corresponding fragment of intuitionistic logic, and a fortiori for classical logic,
we can take (q?>q)-+p as such a formula.)
46
But aren't the instances of this universal formula just aspects of the substitutivity of
= No: on Dunn's that would be the case rather for:
identity: Pa?>(a b->Pb)? treatment,
=
(Pa & a b) -? Pb, a formula deductively weaker (in R) than the iterated implicational
formula. But what if we took, instead of Pa, Pa-*Pa in the conjunctively antecedented
formula, and made our substitution for the second occurrence (only) of 'a'? This might
seem to give
(i) ((Pa->Pa) &a = b)->(Pa->Pb)
and so
(ii) a = b-^(Pa^Pb)
whence
=
(iii) Pa-+(a b-+Pb)
which we were trying to avoid. The transition from (ii) to (iii)-by 'permuting antecedents'
- is all
right (inR); themistake is in passing from (i) to (ii): a blatant case of 'suppression'.
It is interesting to note, based on line (i), that although Pa is not equivalent to the relevant
predication \/x(x
=
a-^Px) it is equivalent to Vx((Pa->Pa) & x = a)-*Px). This
particular subtlety will pose considerable interpretational difficulties for those unwilling to
refine further their 'pre-relevant' intuitions.
47
That is, they will not all be watching counterparts of Reagan. Need they all be watching
of Reagan? Hardly: as long as exact similarities in the perceived parts of Reagan
duplicates
are preserved, things will look the same. Need they all be watching anything? Here- if not
? we
before arrive at delicate questions about broad and narrow content, and the individua
tion of experiential states, that are definitely worth avoiding to keep the present discussion
within acceptable bounds.
Do not be misled by the appearance of the term 'Socrates' here: we are concerned with
'Socrates is wise' as an unanalyzed sentence; perhaps an example such as 'Not all philoso
phers are wise' or 'It sometimes rains' would be less distracting.

49
If it is insisted that the definiens contain all thefree variables of the definiendum, we can
follow Dunn's lead and use an absorption to satisfy this syntactic restriction.
equivalent
50
The difference in the treatment of such 'phoney' relations between the 'relevant predica
tion' approach and the approach illustrated in note 14 above deserves more attention than
we can give it here; suffice it to observe that the spuriously relational status of Fx & Gy on
the latter approach is recorded by making a claim (namely that the 'forgetful transitivity'
condition of note 14 is satisfied) while on Dunn's approach it ismarked by witholding a
claim (namely the first of the two inset formulas in the text to which the present note is
appended).
51
The point which follows may also be found in a condensed form in the last three para
graphs of Section III of Lewis 1970; see also the final sentence of Section IIof Lewis 1966.
52
This rigid/non-rigid talk of course originates in Kripke (1972) (originally published
1970); the distinction in question also appears inLewis (1966), innote 6 of which non-rigid
designators are called 'contingent names'. See also Tye (1981), Jackson (1982).
53
The words 'in this case' are inserted to avoid creating the impression that two property
denoting expressions denote the same propertyc iff those expressions have the same sense.
(It is not hard to see that there is no class of entities whatever which are such that the only
way for distinct terms to denote the same entity in the class is for them to have the same
sense.) What is special about the present case (and that of (i)?(iii? is that the denoting
expressions are all of the form 'The property of being_', or 'The property of_-ing'
so that their senses are in a one-to-one correspondence with the senses of the predicate
for which a place ismarked with the blank. These are what Putnam (1969) calls 'canon
ical descriptions' of properties, and Jackson (1982) speaks of as the 'participle notation'
('gerund' would be better); the latter paper provides further amplification of the present
point, as does Tye (1981).
54 am
I grateful to Edward Khamara for initially stimulating my interest in these topics, to
John Bigelow and Brian Ellis formaking available pertinent (as yet) unpublished material
of theirs, and to Rae Langton for conversations which resulted in considerable improve
ments to an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to David Lewis and to a Synthese referee
for some additional corrections.
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Monash University
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Victoria 3168
Australia

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Intrinsic/Extrinsic

ABSTRACT. Several intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions amongst properties, current in the liter

Synthese 108: 205-267, 1996.

independently of the external forces acting on it. The Ellis-intrinsic proper

asking what it is for an arbitrary object to have a property essentially, while

possessed by a. In Section 3, we shall have occasion to observe that David

ty in ethics (formoral principles) and philosophy of science (for natural

change may or may not reflect a genuine or 'real' change undergone by x;

stands for an intrinsic

change in b). But the predicate in question, which comes to be true of a

attributing the acquisition of, specifically, intrinsic properties.

(namely, particular height-properties) of a and b taken separately, their

envisaged change a genuine change in a, in the case in which a outgrows

having a property at some (unspecified but fixed) time, or of some temporal

the property is extrinsic, but is no longer non-relational (since the stage in

prefer to skirt these issues here.

object x be deemed to arise whenever some predicate true of x might not

possession by the number nine of the property of being the number of

change in a, while, ft's being outgrown by a reflects a merely Cambridge

As intimated in our Introduction, some writers tend to oppose relational

property's being relational. To get our bearings in the area of relational

itions designed to capture the (relatively) informal notions of a pure and an

DEFINITION 1.P is apositive relational property iff, for any individual

DEFINITION 2. A property P is impure iff there is at least one individual

Thus, to use one of Khamara's examples, the property of being married to

DEFINITION 1' P is a positive relational property iff 3RVx(Px <->

(1) 3yix{Px <+Rxy)

But is a problem here: (1) and (2) are not respectively

We might ask if there is a simple definition of'relational property' which

we?) R as the identity relation =. A second way of subsuming both positive

property of bearing R to something, there is the property of being P'd by

'negative' standard quantifiers, such as 'for no x\) The relational prop

naturally be described as positive relational properties obtained from R

seem here to have a point in favour of classifying them as relational. As

Mx(Px -> 3y(y / x&Rxy))6

example, the property of admiring at most three individuals. Does posses

ining ways of obtaining one-place predicates from two-place predicates,

We have listed three different

property in terms of R, and that what we have inmind is a property

binary relation R the?surely we want to say? impure relational property of

bearing R to at least one of two individuals a and b. There is no individual

from which we can obtain

binary relation (to adopt a natural extension of the 'purity' terminology);

obviously if such relations are allowed to instantiate the variable 'P' in

vantage of introducing a locution of which we have at present no articulated

understanding: what exactly is it, anyway, for possessing such-and-such

property to consist in standing in so-and-so relation to some specified

Before proceeding, we should note some minor grounds for concern

(ii) Another contentious aspect of the present example is the assumption

gives rise to a property-expressing predicate when the '6' is replaced by

complications raised by Karmo's 'omniscient God' example (though it does

by reference to both examples. For this second example (of difficulties

Vxiy(x Tinthrees y ?-? (x ismade of tin& y is the number 3))

Since this is intended as a definition, we take it to be both necessarily true

example of a non-relational property.

temperature-in-degrees-Celsius to the number 60. But Crane (1990, p.

This interesting (the conflation

Such questions aside, itwill be clear from the discussion of 'internal'

Though conjunctive, this condition on x and y does not render the

for the variations we have to consider. The trouble is: can

either would be a satisfactory definition by itself. (Terms are frequently

(S\) \/x(x is a brother of y <-*(x is a sibling of y & x ismale))

y consists in x and y having the same parents.21

sponding coarser policy for relations would be that relations which, as an