Realism, Platonic

The dialectical path on which we are now embarked may be compared to another that 1 have explored elsewhere. Consider Platonic realism as a theory of predication for an object to be red is for it to stand in a special relation. Exemplification, to a special entity, Redness. One could complain that this theory does not do justice to the thought that being red (or being square, in case you take a traditional line about secondary qualities) is an intrinsic feature of an object, not merely a relation of it to something else. Platonic realists make all predicational facts relational. In so doing, they make the subjects of predication in one sense bare, devoid of intrinsic properties. A better alternative, it seems to me, is a view in which to be red or square is to be some way— 3. monadic rather than a relational fact about it. 

I sometimes wonder whether my misgivings about Moorean transparency and Platonic realism could both be met by the same metaphysical maneuver. The worry in one case is that the theory leaves out what it is like (intrinsically) to see red in the other, that it leaves out what it is like (intrinsically) to be red. But perhaps one could say that there is something special about the two fundamental relations of Intentionality and Exemplification — that they are both quality-making relations. When something stands in the Exemplification relation to Redness, it thereby acquires the quality or intrinsic character of being red, and when someone stands in the Intentional relation to a red object, the person thereby acquires the... 

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