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Quantities as Numerical Attributes

While the determinable/determinates model of quantities treats quantities as (special cases of) variable attributes, the approaches considered in this chapter focus on quantities as numerical attributes: being numerically representable is what makes quantities special, if anything does. I distinguish three different attitudes to quantities thus conceived: restrictive realism, restrictive empiricism, and permissive empiricism. Restrictive realists hold that quantitativeness is a feature of attributes, not concepts, and not all attributes are quantitative; restrictive empiricists hold that quantitativeness is a feature of concepts, not attributes, but only some concepts are quantitative; permissivists hold that there is nothing special about quantitative concepts, since any attribute can be numerically represented. This chapter argues that we should reject the idea that quantities are numerical attributes or concepts and suggest that we should focus on the uniqueness of the numerical representation instead, a claim that will be made more precise in Chapter 6.