For some reason it seems to be nit-picking afternoon here at TAR, so here goes. I really mean the fact that I pick nits to be a sign of affirmation of the paper I have bothered to nit-pick (rather than, say, utterly ignore) but I would understand if other folk did not agree.

Anyway, our first entrant is Jonathan Cohen’s nice manifesto Color Properties and Color Ascriptions.

Now, the antonym of ‘relational’ is obviously `non-relational’, rather than `intrinsic’, and this matters because, as argued in Humberstone, 1996, the relational/non-relational distinction is not equivalent to the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Consequently, the main contrast of concern in this paper will be that between relational and non-relational views of color. However, there does seem to be a connection between the two distinctions that will be relevant. Namely, if an intrinsic property is characterized in a rough-and-ready way as “a property that a thing has (or lacks) regardless of what may be going on outside itself” (Yablo, 1999, 479), then intrinsic properties will also be non-relational. For x cannot bear a relation to something other than x (hence cannot exemplify a relational property) regardless of what may be going on outside itself: at a minimum, x cannot bear a relation R to y (and hence cannot exemplify a relational property) unless y exists.

I don’t think this is quite right. For one thing, the conclusion in Lloyd Humberstone’s paper isn’t that intrinsic doesn’t equal relational, it’s that there is a category difference between the things that are intrinsic or nor (what Lloyd calls properties) and the things that are relational or not (what he calls concepts). So there can’t be an inclusion relation between the two because they are cross-categorical.

Set that worry aside, I still think the claim fails. Consider the property/concept having the same polarity as one’s longest finger. (I mean polarity here in the sense that something can be positively charged, negatively charged, or neither. In practice it’s often indeterminate what the charge of a large object is, so it may be indeterminate which things have this property. Or concept.) This is relational, I think, but it’s also intrinsic, provided charge and length (and, a bit contentiously, being a finger of) are intrinsic.

The bug here is that if a relational property relates something to one of it’s own parts (as it were, I’m speaking pretty loosely here) then it might still be intrinsic. It’s unlikely this matters to the debate about colours, which is why this is a nit-picking point not a serious criticism.

There may be a definition of relational around where relations to one’s own parts are tacitly, or even explicitly, excluded. But I couldn’t see one in a quick scan of Cohen’s paper. As I said, those relations really aren’t relevant to what he has in mind, so nothing here undermines what he says. It just could have been said more pedantically.

The closest we get to a definition of relationality is interestingly ambiguous on just this point

roughly, a non-relational property of x is a property that x has (or lacks) regardless of the relations x bears to things other than x.

Is my finger something other than me? In one sense yes, by Leibniz’s Law it is not identical with me. In one sense no, since it is not, as Lewis puts it, wholly distinct from me. I think the former is the more natural reading, but the latter is really what is needed here.

For some reason it seems to be nit-picking afternoon here at TAR, so here goes. I really mean the fact that I pick nits to be a sign of affirmation of the paper I have bothered to nit-pick (rather than, say, utterly ignore) but I would understand if other folk did not agree.

Anyway, our first entrant is Jonathan Cohen’s nice manifesto Color Properties and Color Ascriptions.

Now, the antonym of ‘relational’ is obviously `non-relational’, rather than `intrinsic’, and this matters because, as argued in Humberstone, 1996, the relational/non-relational distinction is not equivalent to the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Consequently, the main contrast of concern in this paper will be that between relational and non-relational views of color. However, there does seem to be a connection between the two distinctions that will be relevant. Namely, if an intrinsic property is characterized in a rough-and-ready way as “a property that a thing has (or lacks) regardless of what may be going on outside itself” (Yablo, 1999, 479), then intrinsic properties will also be non-relational. For x cannot bear a relation to something other than x (hence cannot exemplify a relational property) regardless of what may be going on outside itself: at a minimum, x cannot bear a relation R to y (and hence cannot exemplify a relational property) unless y exists.

I don’t think this is quite right. For one thing, the conclusion in Lloyd Humberstone’s paper isn’t that intrinsic doesn’t equal relational, it’s that there is a category difference between the things that are intrinsic or nor (what Lloyd calls properties) and the things that are relational or not (what he calls concepts). So there can’t be an inclusion relation between the two because they are cross-categorical.

Set that worry aside, I still think the claim fails. Consider the property/concept having the same polarity as one’s longest finger. (I mean polarity here in the sense that something can be positively charged, negatively charged, or neither. In practice it’s often indeterminate what the charge of a large object is, so it may be indeterminate which things have this property. Or concept.) This is relational, I think, but it’s also intrinsic, provided charge and length (and, a bit contentiously, being a finger of) are intrinsic.

The bug here is that if a relational property relates something to one of it’s own parts (as it were, I’m speaking pretty loosely here) then it might still be intrinsic. It’s unlikely this matters to the debate about colours, which is why this is a nit-picking point not a serious criticism.

There may be a definition of relational around where relations to one’s own parts are tacitly, or even explicitly, excluded. But I couldn’t see one in a quick scan of Cohen’s paper. As I said, those relations really aren’t relevant to what he has in mind, so nothing here undermines what he says. It just could have been said more pedantically.

The closest we get to a definition of relationality is interestingly ambiguous on just this point

roughly, a non-relational property of x is a property that x has (or lacks) regardless of the relations x bears to things other than x.

Is my finger something other than me? In one sense yes, by Leibniz’s Law it is not identical with me. In one sense no, since it is not, as Lewis puts it, wholly distinct from me. I think the former is the more natural reading, but the latter is really what is needed here.