One source of philosophical controversy is that of universals.

To me, this seems to be an instance of the tooth pain issue.

Here is an account: 1

  • Noun-ness was for ordinary objects (with obvious ontological status) in an earlier language game. E.g. rocks, tigers, hands.
  • Our creativity with language / grammatical led us to nounify many other words, leading to ‘objects’ with unclear ontological status.

Footnotes

  1. This same account is mentioned in this talk, only to be critiqued soon after.