One contentious issue is whether the teleological approach championed by Millikan can be combined with informational semantics so that S can be said to represent instances of property F if and only if it is S's function to carry information about F. Against this proposal, Millikan (2004) has argued that the information carried by a sign depends on its causes, not its effects.
If true (the predication is veridical), the argument instantiates (exemplifies) the property and is called an instance of that property.
Without that support, individual instances of properties could, if they could exist at all, be no more than ephemeral events.
The Macdonalds' insistence that they are turns on the point that only instances of properties cause anything.
So Honderich's nomological property principle must itself be amended to the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causally Relevant Instances of Properties.
Nicolas proposes that their subjects, which are headed by abstract mass nouns, do refer (or make as if to refer) to instances of properties or relations, thereby introducing these as referents in the discourse (Moltmann 2007 proposes something similar).
Substances and events are distinguished from properties by the fact that properties are the kinds of things the instances of which depend for their existence on the particular substance or event by which they are instantiated, whereas substances and events are such as not to depend for their existence on particular instances of properties.
Other maximalists and optimalists, often those wary of facts, posit (non-transferrable) tropes as truth-makers for contingent predications (Martin 1980; Mulligan, Simons, & Smith 1984: 295 304, Lowe 2006: 186 7, 204 5) Tropes, in the non-transferrable sense, are particular instances of properties that are existentially dependent upon their bearers.
There is also the question of equality -- why should a case of property dispute, for instance, not be disposed sooner?
Similarly for properties or tropes, there can never be only one because any one entails the existence of others, as, for example, the existence of a red property (instance) entails the existence of (an instance of) the property colour.
