"Meaning and the Problem of Universals, A Kant-Friesian Approach", by Kelley L. Ross


Thus, Locke cannot find any difference between the idea "horse" and the idea "Bucephalus" but "in leaving out something that is peculiar to each individual, and retaining so much of those particular complex ideas of several particular existences as they are found to agree in" [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XI, §9, & Book III, Chapter III, §9].

That's very similar to Ayn Rand's solution. But Rand did not resort to any mysticism whatsoever in her characterisation of objects; they are just plain, old-fashioned, concrete objects--not ideas or bare collections of properties, just physical objects. What she claims is that you abstract from an object by taking its particular collection of (qualitative) properties and omitting their quantitative measurements. These measurements must exist in some quantity, but they may exist in any quantity, so they are omitted for the purposes of abstraction*. This sounds like an obvious enough approach, but then again, the right approach always sounds obvious after the fact.

*At least two qualifications must be made to this thesis:

  1. Measurements essential to the meaning of the concept must be retained. Hence, the concept 'forty-foot pole' will retain the measurement of forty feet, but its width, colour, texture and so on can be safely omitted.
  2. Measurement omission often only occurs for a certain range of values that are plausible for that concept. Hence, a chair that is a hundred feet tall would, ceteris paribus, no longer be a chair. The omitted measurements for the height of a chair, therefore, must fall within a range of values that would result in a physical object suitable for the being in question to sit on.

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