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Chapter 1 – What is a table? - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The pins represent the properties on an object and the cushion represents the particular itself. (...) when all its pins have been removed, is a particular that has been stripped of all its properties so that we can think of what the table itself is. And without properties, it couldn’t therefore look or feel like anything.
        
        :explode: Absurdity: abstracting the properties of a thing seems to lead to a no-thing :hole: ('bareness')
        
        When in our minds we stripped away those properties, in a process of abstraction, the fear was that we were left with nothing at all. So shouldn’t we then just countenance the possibility that there is nothing more to a particular than that bundle of properties?
        
        Bundle (of properties) view
        
        There can be no 'bare' particulars, existing without having properties.
        
        :explode: The problem of change
        
        If a thing were just a collection of properties, it couldn’t survive any change. If one property were lost and another gained, we would have a different collection: for I am assuming that what makes a collection the same thing at different times is that it is composed of the same component things. Consequently, two collections are different if the things collected within them are different. And clearly, the particulars that interest us change all the time while remaining (numerically) the same.
        
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        (…) it is worth mentioning what might be a big advantage of this bundle view. (…) the notion of substratum has been reduced away entirely (...). Objects would just be nothing more than bundles of properties, appropriately arranged.
        
        Now there is no particular reason why a simpler and more economical theory is more likely to be true than a complex and uneconomical one, but philosophers prefer the simple ones. Certainly, there seems no reason to tolerate redundancy in one’s theory of the world because any redundant elements are clearly not needed for the account to work. They serve no purpose.
        
        :explode: there could be two particulars with exactly the same properties
        
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    - - We can say that something has changed qualitatively even though it has remained numerically the same.