According to Ehring, this is not true. To see why not, he asks us to consider the following simple scenario: a property-instance at t₁ is causally responsible for an instance of the same property at t₂. This is a case of causation which is also a case of property persistence. But what does property persistence involve? According to Ehring, property persistence is not just a matter of something not changing its properties. For, even in cases where nothing discernibly changes, the property instantiated at t₁ could nevertheless have been replaced by another property of the same type during the period between t₁ and t₂. To be able to ontologically explain the scenario, therefore, we first need an account of property persistence able to distinguish ‘true property persistence from cases of ‘non-salient property change or what may also be called property type persistence. But, Ehring claims, this is something a theory according to which property instances are states of affairs cannot do (this he demonstrates with the help of a number of thought experiments, which space does not allow me to reproduce here, but cf. Ehring 1997: 91ff). Therefore, causation gives us reason to think that tropes exist (for more reasons to prefer tropes as causal relata, cf. Garcia-Encinas 2009).

This idea, it is argued, is really a couple notions, namely:

According to Garcia (2016), just what part tropes could play in the causation is dependent upon exactly how i consider of characteristics from tropes. In the event the tropes are the thing that he phone calls ‘modifiers, they don’t have the type they confer, a fact that would seem to make them smaller compatible as causal relata. Continua a leggere