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Substance & properties
What is left when you take everything away?
An apple is red, round, sweet and about 150 grams. Those are its properties. But what has those properties? It seems natural to say: the apple itself. That “thing which has the properties” is what philosophers call a substance.
Now try a thought experiment, first done by John Locke. Take away the redness. Then the roundness. Then the size, the weight, the taste. What is left?
Try it · Turn the apple's properties off one by one. When all are gone, switch between the two theories and see what each says remains.
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One answer: a bare substratum, a featureless “something” that held all the properties together. Locke called it “something, I know not what.” Another answer, from David Hume: nothing at all. On the bundle theory, an object just is a bundle of properties tied together, with no hidden core.
Both views have problems. A bare substratum can never be observed, so how do we know it is there? But if an apple is only a bundle, what ties this bundle together and keeps it separate from the next one?
Key ideas
Words worth remembering
- Property
- A feature something has: a color, a shape, a mass.
- Substratum theory
- Beneath the properties there is a bare thing that has them.
- Bundle theory
- An object is nothing more than its properties bundled together.
Think about it
Could two objects have exactly the same properties and still be two different things?