ABSTRACT
To believe that properties are abundant is to believe that there are a great many properties, including a property corresponding to (almost) every predicate. To believe in sparseness is to believe that among these is a privileged minority – a small group suited to play certain important roles in phenomena including similarity, laws of nature, causation, reference, explanation, fundamentality, and induction. Sparseness is a worldly, objective matter, such that the interests of inquirers play no role in determining which properties are sparse. In this chapter, I offer an opinionated overview of sparseness. I begin by considering motivations for sparseness, survey some influential approaches to sparseness and the roles that they attribute to sparse properties, and consider some problems for sparseness, focusing on the purported connections between sparseness and inquiry.
