Elisa Paganini Università degli Studi di Milano Talking about Properties A Couple of Doubts on Hofweber’s Internalist View [Final draft – Published in Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artefactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics, London, Bloomsbury 2019, pp. 80-89] Abstract A couple of doubts are raised concerning Hofweber’s internalist view of our talk about properties. The first doubt relates to the argument used in support of the internalist view of talk about properties: I suspect that one of the premises of the argument is not granted and therefore that the argument’s conclusion is undermined. My second doubt concerns a claimed consequence of Hofweber’s internalist view, i.e. conceptual idealism. It seems to me that conceptual idealism is incompatible with the internalist view of talk about properties. The distinction between natural objects and artefactual ones has a long tradition in metaphysics. It presupposes that objects may be divided into two kinds: (i) natural kinds, i.e. objects marking true joints in nature and (ii) artefactual kinds, i.e. objects whose classification reflects the actions and interests of human beings. This distinction takes some notions of metaphysical priority as basic: natural kinds are generally considered more fundamental than artefactual ones. But what does “natural” mean? What does “fundamental” mean? According to Thomas Hofweber (2009 and 2016a), a certain way of doing metaphysics considers notions like “natural”, “fundamental” or “ultimate” as distinctively metaphysical and primitive, where this means that they are different from the notions we use in our everyday conversations and cannot be defined in more simple terms. The specificity and indefinability of these notions raises the concern that metaphysical distinctions are made using terms taken for granted without a correct and precise understanding of them. It is due to this concern that Hofweber denounces what he calls “esoteric metaphysics” – a metaphysics that aims to answer questions involving primitively metaphysical terms – and proposes instead “egalitarian metaphysics” – a form of metaphysics that tries to answer questions accessible to all and without special terms for metaphysical insiders. 1 Within egalitarian metaphysics, “being natural” and “being artefactual” are on a par, they are predicates of natural language, used within science and common conversations. When we use these predicates, we may want to talk about properties, we may want to consider for example whether the property of being natural is more (or less) frequently instantiated than the property of being artefactual. And, according to Hofweber, when we talk about properties, whatever we say depends on us and our minds and not on how the objects in the world are in themselves. In order to understand this claim, it is useful first of all to consider how he thinks we should answer the question: “Are there properties?” and then how he argues for the internalist view of our talk about properties. My reconstruction of his argument is not neutral, my aim is to raise a couple of doubts on his account of our talk about properties. 1 The distinction between esoteric and egalitarian metaphysics is central to Hofweber (2009) and Hofweber (2016a, ch. 13).