  Before leaving the topic of reductive realism, we need to take account of a slight complication. In our discussion to this point, we have been speaking as if reductive realists always intend to identify individual paradigmatic relations such as tallness or shortness with pairs of monadic properties taken jointly. We have done this because, at least initially, this seems to be the most natural way to understand their position. After all, it is not Simmias’s height taken by itself that necessitates his being taller than anyone; it is only his height taken together with that of another, say, Socrates. And yet, despite the naturalness of this way of construing reductive realism, it is not the way its proponents typically understand  it.[21]  On the contrary, instead of identifying relations such as tallness or shortness with pairs of monadic properties taken jointly, reductive realists typically identify them with the individual members of such pairs. Thus, if Simmias is taller than Socrates, it is only Simmias’s height that is identified with Simmias’s tallness (and hence said to correspond to the concept ‘taller than’), whereas Socrates’s height is identified with Socrates’s shortness (and hence said to correspond to the concept ‘shorter than’). But how is this possible, especially if the properties in question are supposed to be just ordinary heights?