The nature of relations is still in need of clarification. In particular, it is important to distinguish between the nature of relations and the nature of relational facts. The latter we know nowadays are irreducible to qualitative facts. But, I shall contend, the former are ontologically reducible to monadic properties. My contention amounts, I believe, to the development of an insight of Plato's. The point I want to make here is, however, not historical, but ontological, and I can motivate it by what seems to me the serious predicament of a brilliant philosopher dealing with an important problem in elementary ontology (or metaphysics, if you prefer). Thus, my solution to this philosopher's predicament is a contribution to ontology (or metaphysics).
I. THE IDENTITY OF PROPOSITIONS AND CONVERSE RELATIONS
Neil Wilson, in a superb paper on facts and events 1, claims that the only propositions one has to be committed to are atomic propositions. I won't discuss this thesis. His main task, which again I will not discuss, is to argue that events are truncated propositions. Wilson takes propositions to be certain complexes:
A proposition has as constituents an individual and a property, or a number of individuals and a relation of appropriate degree, z One of the basic premises in his argument is his principle for the identity of propositions: And obviously two propositions, and, afortiori, two facts will be identical if they have the same constituents in the same order. This is what I shall call a 'proposition-theoretic assumption'. Symbolically, PTA. 1.