 Whether this account is really informative can however be questioned. For, at least if objects are bundles of tropes, the individuation of objects will depend on the individuation of the tropes that make them up, which means that, on OI, individuation becomes circular (Lowe 1998: 206f.; Schaffer 2001: 249; Ehring 2011: 77). Indeed, matters improve only marginally if objects are understood as substrates in which tropes are instantiated. For, although on this view, individuation can be non-circularly accounted for, this is because it is now the substrate which carries the individuating burden. This leaves the individuation of the substrate still unaccounted for, and so we appear to have gotten nowhere (Mertz 2001). Any trope theorist who accepts the possible existence of ‘free-floating’ tropes—i.e., tropes that exist unattached to any object—must in any case reject this account of trope individuation (at least as long as she accepts the possibility of there being more than one free-floating trope at any given time). For these reasons, although some of the things trope theorists have said may make it sound as if they endorse OI, no trope theorist has come out ‘in public’ to state that she does.