ABSTRACT
In his chapter on universals in this volume, Pranab Kumar Sen raises some hard questions regarding the alleged incompatibility between realism about universals and a robust naturalism. Unless universals take part in causation, and unless some of them are objects of ordinary sense-experience, insistence on the existence of universals would always smell of a kind of fictionalism, as if the existence-claim were in need of the qualifier: ‘in a manner of speaking’. Sen ends the essay dramatically with what I take to be a rhetorical question, suggesting some serious disagreement with Strawson whose views he was mainly discussing. He also whets our appetite for a more incisive treatment of this ‘sensitive’ issue by a longish note that alludes to the work of Locke, Kant, Austin, and of the Nyäya epistemologists.
