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Individual/Particular/Bigelow/Pargetter: particulars are something that by definition are never instantiated.
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Instantiation.
On the other hand:
Property/Bigelow/Pargetter: something that is instantiated by definition by things that are never instantiated (individuals).
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Individual/Bigelow/Pargetter: individuals also include measurement terms such as e.g. plutonium.
Cf. >
Natural kinds.
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Individuals/Possible World/Variant/Bigelow/Pargetter: we could also specify individuals by describing their position in the course of their existence.
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Possible worlds.
Through an infinite sequence of quadruples.
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Four-dimensionalism.
There are many variants, including more economical ones.
We can summarize all the positions of a particle in one function. This is also possible for other properties that we attribute to a particle. So we can combine a particle not only with numbers, but also with whole functions.
Function: these functions could describe the changes of the particle.
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Functions.
Book/Bigelow/Pargetter: a book for such a described world could be a Hilbert space.
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Modalities/Bigelow.
But a book is not a world yet! A book for the actual world would consist of
two components:
1. a world property, or a maximum specific structural universal
2. to something that instantiates this universal, that is the world itself.
This applies to the actual world!
Other possible worlds correspond to a universal, but this is not instantiated, so there is no world here.
Representation/Bigelow/Pargetter: now the numbers representing these world properties could seem all too abstract.
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But they are not! They represent the proportions in which the properties of the parts are related to each other that we have chosen as units.
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Proportions.