  Are types universals? They have usually been so conceived, and with good reason. But the matter is controversial. It depends in part on what a universal is. (See the entry on  properties.)  Universals, in contrast to particulars, have been characterized as having instances, being repeatable, being abstract, being acausal, lacking a spatio-temporal location and being predicable of things. Whether universals have all these characteristics cannot be resolved here. The point is that types seem to have some, but not all, of these characteristics. As should be clear from the preceding discussion, types have or are capable of having instances, of being exemplified; they are repeatable. To many, this is enough to count as universals. With respect to being abstract and lacking a spatio-temporal location, types are also akin to universals—that is, they are if universals are. On certain views of types and universals, types, unlike their instances, are abstract and lack a spatio-temporal location. On other views, types and universals are in their instances and hence are neither abstract nor acausal; far from lacking a spatio-temporal location, they usually have many. (For more details, see §5 below, The Relation between Types and Tokens.) So far, then, types appear to be a species of universal, and most metaphysicians would so classify them. (Although a few would not. Zemach (1992), for example, holds that there are no universals, but there are types, which are repeatable particulars—the cat may be in many different places at the same time.)