Category Mistakes

Abstract The chapter sets out to say something illuminating about ontological categories and to gesture in the direction of a two-category—substance–property—ontology, where properties are understood as modes, not universals. A mode is a particular way a substance is. When you describe a substance, you describe ways it is. Locke’s apparent ambivalence about the nature of substances stems from the fact that nothing can be no way at all, and no way could fail to be a way something is. The best we can do is provide a job description: a substance is a ‘substratum’, a bearer of properties. Appeals to truthmaking play a central role in the discussion. The ultimate aim is to comprehend the relation between what Wilfrid Sellars calls ‘the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world’: the scientific image incorporates, at any given time, our best guess as to the nature of truthmakers for truths of the manifest image.