By the time he writes The Structure of Appearance, Goodman has come around to a different criterion for whether or not a system obeys nominalistic structures: the predicates present in the whole system (SA, §II.3). This is as opposed to merely considering the basis of the system in answer to this question as he does in A Study of Qualities (as mentioned above). In Goodman 1958 (see also SA, §III.7), he suggests a different, perhaps more precise, way to characterize nominalistic systems in terms of the system’s generating relation: