Where does property collide?

In metaphysics a property is a quality, attribute, or characteristic that a thing has or instantiates, such as being red, being round, or having a mass: philosophers ask whether a property is a real universal shared by many things or merely a name we group particulars under, the long dispute between realism and nominalism. Armstrong's 1989 Universals: An Opinionated Introduction defended the view that some properties are genuine universals, repeatable entities that many distinct objects can literally share. The referent here is an abstract feature that a thing exemplifies, argued over in ontology, not a right of ownership, a checkable claim about a program, or a measured trait of matter.[1]

Unit

One attribute or quality that a particular exemplifies

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not measured but analysed, by asking what things share a feature and whether that feature is one entity or many

In law and economics property is not a thing but a bundle of rights over a resource: the rights to use it, to exclude others, to draw income from it, and to transfer it, held by a person against everyone else. Demsetz's 1967 Toward a Theory of Property Rights argued that such rights emerge and change when the gains from defining who controls a resource come to outweigh the cost of enforcing that control. The referent is a socially enforced relationship of ownership and control, studied as an economic institution, not an attribute a thing exemplifies, an assertion about a program, or a physical characteristic of a material.[2]

Unit

A set of enforceable rights over a resource, held by an owner

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through law, contracts, and titles, and studied by the costs and incentives that different rights arrangements create

In formal verification a property is a precise logical assertion that a system's behaviour is required to satisfy, checked against every possible execution rather than a handful of test runs. Lamport's 1977 Proving the Correctness of Multiprocess Programs drew the basic division into safety properties, which say that nothing bad ever happens, and liveness properties, which say that something good eventually happens. The referent is a mathematical condition on the runs of a program, proved or model-checked, not a quality a thing instantiates, a right of ownership, or a measurable feature of matter.[3]

Unit

One logical assertion over a system's executions, such as a safety or liveness property

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established by proof or model checking, testing whether every allowed execution satisfies the stated assertion

In the physical sciences a property is a measurable characteristic of a material or system, such as density, temperature, or electrical conductivity, that describes its state or how it responds to conditions. A standard distinction, set out in Redlich's 1970 Intensive and extensive properties, separates intensive properties, which do not depend on how much material is present, like density or temperature, from extensive properties, which scale with amount, like mass or volume. The referent is a quantity read off matter by instruments and expressed in units, not an abstract attribute debated in ontology, a right over a resource, or a logical claim about a program.[4]

Unit

One measurable quantity of a material or system, in physical units

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read directly with instruments and expressed in units, and classified as intensive or extensive by whether it scales with the amount of material