Free-floating Tropes

Donald C. Williams (2018 [1953]) coined the term “trope” for simple or thin particular natures such as determinate qualities (like redness) and quantities (like -e charge or electron mass) in some specific location. According to trope theorists, tropes constitute the sole fundamental category of entities. Therefore, trope theorists analyse objects as mereological sums of tropes fulfilling certain specific conditions and eliminate the object-property dichotomy by means of the analysis of inherence (an object having a property). Moreover, most trope theorists (e.g., Williams, Campbell. Maurin and Ehring) defend the possibility of free-floating tropes as a global thesis: any (non-relational) trope t can exist without being accompanied by any wholly distinct trope u. Even if we can take mutual independence of wholly distinct tropes as a "default setting", I argue that there are good reasons to reject the global thesis. My main conclusion is that the superiority of our Strong Nuclear Theory (SNT) in the analysis of objects and inherence provides us with sufficient reason to adopt SNT instead of any broadly Humean trope theory assuming the global thesis. Yet a trope theorist might allow for some free-floating tropes.