Property instances

Kim talks of properties being in causal relations and also property instances being in causal relations. He identifies events with property instances so the latter involves event causation. 

But of course there are vast numbers of microphysical states of affairs that do not realize property instances or the existence of subjects of property instances. The question now is, in virtue of what is a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of a property instance ... 

A kind of things is normally associated with a number of kinds of properties such that things of that kind must have some property of each of these kinds. A house must have some height, some width, some mass, and so forth. So, if a microphysical state of affairs realizes the existence of a thing of a certain kind, it must guarantee the instantiation of a number of properties. Will this have the consequence that the realizer of any one of a things property instances will at the same time be the realizer of all of its other property instances, or at least a sizable number of them, and that distinct property instances will not have distinct realizers ... 

One would think that property instances are identical just in case their specific realizers are identical. One would also think that if properties P... 

This is in fact the view Jaegwon Kim has advanced in several places about instances of second-order properties and instances of their first-order realizers.As Kim has noted, such an identification requires a revision of his property-exemplification account of events assuming that mental properties are second-order properties, it requires the exclusion of mental properties as constitutive properties of events. This instance-identity thesis is supposed to support reductionism about the mental. But there is a tension between this thesis and Kim s formulation in several places of his causal inheritance principle, which says that the causal powers of an instance of a higher-order property are identical with or are a subset of [emphasis mine] the causal powers of the instance of its realizer. Clearly, if the causal powers of the realized property instance were... 

I think that the subset version of the causal inheritance principle is clearly preferable to the version that says that the causal powers of the realized property instance are identical with the causal powers of the realizer instance, so I think that the instance-identity thesis is false. We can make sense of the idea of an instance of a higher-order property having a realizer different from the realizer of the instance of its determinate or property realizer if we can make sense of the idea of the higher-order property instances having cores that are distinct from the cores of the realizers of the instances of their determinates or physical property realizers. And 1 think we can do this. 

An advantage of this account is that it holds instances of mental properties to be physically realized in a way that allows them to be causally efficacious, and it removes the threat that their causal efficacy is preempted by the instantiation of their physical property realizers. In the case where pain is property-realized by C-fiber stimulation, it is not true to say that the causal work we would like to ascribe to the pain instance is really done insteadhy the C-fiber-stimulation instance. Nor is it true, as it is on Kim s instance-identity thesis, that, although this work is done by the pain instance, this is only because it is identical with the C-fiber-stimulation instance. The work is indeed done by the C-fiber-stimulation instance, but this is because the core of the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer has the core of the pain instance realizer as a part. It is only because the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer contains the pain instance realizer that it has the relevant effects. Recall that the core of a property instance realizer consists of the states of affairs that contribute directly to the implementation of the causal profile of the property. The core of the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer contains states of affairs that contribute to the implementation of the causal profile of pain, but these make this contribution only because they realize states of affairs contained in the state of affairs that is the core of the pain instance realizer. 

It might seem - and I at first thought - that this is a psychophysical identity theory that identifies mental property instances with microphysical states of affairs. But there are at least two obstacles to such an identification. 

First, a property instance would seem to be itself a concrete state of affairs, one having just one constituent object, the subject of the property, and just one constituent property, namely, the property instantiated. The realizer of the property instance is partly a concrete state of affairs having a vast number of microentities as constituent objects and a vast number of properties of these as constituent properties, and it contains in addition positive and negative existential states of affairs. If states of affairs are individuated by what their constituent objects are and how these are propertied... 

So, the relation between a property instance and its microphysical realizer is constitution, not identity. 

But there is one sort of property realizer that mental properties have to have if their instances are realized in microphysical states of affairs. For any type of microphysical state of affairs that can be the maximally determinate realizer of an instance of a particular macrophysical property, there is a property something has just in case its career includes a microphysical state of affairs of that type that realizes an instance of that property. Let s speak of these as properties of macroscopic entities that embed maximally determinate microphysical states of affairs that are property instance realizers - call them microphysical-state-of-affairs-embedding properties, or MSE-properties. If a property is such that an instance of it can be realized in a maximally determinate microphysical state of affairs of a certain type, then the corresponding MSE-property will be among its possible property realizers. Assuming physicalism, mental properties will have such properties as realizers. But so also will all other properties of macroscopic things - or, rather, all other properties that are not themselves MSE-properties. Properties such as shape, mass, electrical charge, are ones whose different instances are realized in microphysical states of affairs of different sorts, and so ones that are realized in a variety of MSE-properties. 

The language elements of an SW ontology are classes, properties, instances, and relationships between/among them described in the object level and the meta-level as depicted in Fig. 8.2. At the object level, an instance can be an individual or a literal of a domain, e.g. j ohn, and property is a relationship between individuals, or is an individual s attribute, e.g. has Son, type. At the meta-level, a metainstance can be an individual name, a property name, a class, or an object-level statement. A meta-property is a property to describe a meta-instance s attribute or a relationship between/among meta-instances, e.g. reflexive. 

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