TY - JOUR T1 - Relata-specific relations: a response to Vallicella JF - Dialectica Y1 - 2008 A1 - Wieland, Jan Willem A1 - Betti, Arianna AB -

According to Vallicella's 'Relations, Monism, and the Vindication of Bradley's Regress' (2002), if relations are to relate their relata, some special operator must do the relating. No other options will do. In this paper we reject Vallicella's conclusion by considering an important option that becomes visible only if we hold onto a precise distinction between the following three feature-pairs of relations: internality/externality, universality/particularity, relata-specificity/relata-unspecificity. The conclusion we reach is that if external relations are to relate their relata, they must be relata-specific (and no special operator is needed). As it eschews unmereological complexes, this outcome is of relevance to defenders of the extensionality of composition.

VL - 62 SP - 509–524 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2008.01167.x ER -