 Lowe (2006) has tried to tackle Bradley’s regress within his pluralist approach to exemplification. In his view, characterization, instantiation and exemplification are “formal” and thus quite different from garden-variety relations such giving or loving. This guarantees that these three relations escape Bradley’s regress (Lowe 2006: 30, 80,  90).[11]  Let us illustrate how, by turning back to the Fido example of  §2.1.  What a mode instantiates and what it characterizes belong to its essence. In other words, a mode cannot exist without instantiating the attribute it instantiates and characterizing the object it characterizes. Hence, mode \(b\), by simply existing, instantiates attribute \(B\) and characterizes Fido. Moreover, since exemplification (the occurrent one, in this case) results from “composing” characterization and instantiation, \(b\)’s existence also guarantees that Fido exemplifies \(B\). According to Lowe, we thus have some truths, that \(b\) characterizes Fido, that \(b\) instantiates \(B\), and that Fido exemplifies \(B\) (i.e., is barking), all of which are made true by \(b\). Hence, there is no need to postulate as truthmakers states of affairs with constituents, Fido and \(b\), related by characterization, or \(b\) and \(B\), related by exemplification, or Fido and \(B\), related by exemplification. This, in Lowe’s opinion, eschews Bradley’s regress, since this arises precisely because we appeal to states of affairs with constituents in need of a glue that contingently keep them together. Nevertheless, there is no loss of contingency in Lowe’s world picture, for an object need not be characterized by the modes that happen to characterize it. Thus, for example, mode \(b\) might have failed to exist and there could have been a Fido silence mode in its stead, in which case the proposition that Fido is barking would have been false and the proposition that Fido is silent would have been true. One may wonder however what makes it the case that a certain mode is a mode of just a certain object and not of another one, say another barking dog. Even granting that it is essential for \(b\) to be a mode of Fido, rather than of another dog, it remains true that it is of Fido, rather than of the other dog, and one may still think that this being of is also glue of some sort, perhaps with a contingency inherited from the contingency of \(b\) (which might have failed to exist). The suspicion then is that the problem of accounting for the relation between a mode and an object has replaced the Armstrongian one of what makes it the case that a universal \(P\) and an object \(x\) make up the state of affairs \(x\)’s being \(P\). But the former problem, one may urge, is no less thorny than the latter, and some universalists like Armstrong may consider uneconomical Lowe’s acceptance of tropes in addition to universals (for accounts of Bradley’s regress analogous to Lowe’s, but within a thoroughly tropist ontology, see Section 3.2 of the entry on  tropes.)