Titlul prezentării sale este „A Pretense Account of Property-Talk for Property Deflationists”. Iată un rezumat:
”In this talk, I develop and defend a novel form of property deflationism—predicate-variabl
e deflationism—that is fully compatible with property nominalism. I argue that property-talk—discourse involving terms like ‘property’, ‘attribute’, etc.—does not describe a domain of abstract universals but rather provides a first-order surrogate for second-order quantification into predicate-position. A central challenge for property deflationists is to interpret such second-order machinery without smuggling properties back in. After critically assessing extant deflationist approaches, I meet this challenge by drawing on A.N. Prior’s work on non-nominal, adjectival (‘how-talk‘) quantification. I then explain how property-talk indirectly expresses such higher-order content by invoking semantic-pretense-involving fictionalism (‘SPIF‘), which allows property-talk to be genuinely true while avoiding any ontological commitment to properties.”