So, I recently wrote a post that was intended to be an attack on Quine’s argument for natural kinds. And tucked away in the very last paragraph, I think I put the most important statement of the post: It’s really not just an attack on Quine’s argument. It’s an attack on a much more general strategy for solving Goodman’s Paradox. I want to make a separate post to call that out–so here it is.
The real thrust of the arguent is that projectability is not a property of predicates. To give you an idea of how realatively broad that is, I’ll note that not only is it a refutation of Quine’s solution to Goodman’s Paradox, it’s also a refutation of Goodman’s own (radically different) solution. Whether the account of projectability is as realist as Quine’s “Projectable claims involve natural kinds” or as constructivist as Goodman’s “Projectable claims involve entrenched predicates,” if you think that you can pick out a unary property of predicates that allows them to participate in projectable claims, I think you’re going to run into trouble with my argument.
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