 Armstrong (2004) tries to do without aspects. At first glance it seems as if he analyzes exemplification, for he takes the exemplification of a property (a universal) by a particular to be a partial identity of the property and the particular; as he puts it (2004: 47), “[i]t is not a mere mereological overlap, as when two streets intersect, but it is a partial identity”. However, when we see more closely what this partial identity amounts to, the suspicion arises that it presupposes exemplification. For Armstrong appears to identify a particular via the properties that it instantiates and similarly a property via the particulars that instantiate it. So that we may identify a particular, \(x\), via a collection of properties qua instantiated by \(x\), say \(\{F_x,\) \(G_x,\) \(H_x,\) …, \(P_x,\) \(Q_x,\) \(\ldots\};\) and a property, \(P\), via a collection of particulars qua instantiating \(P\), say \(\{P_a, P_b , \ldots ,P_x, P_y , \ldots \}\). By putting things in this way, we can then say that a particular is partially identical to a property when the collection that identifies the particular has an element in common with the collection that identifies the property. To illustrate, the \(x\) and the \(P\) of our example are partially identical because they have the element \(P_x\) in common. Now, the elements of these collections are neither properties tout court nor particulars tout court, which led us to talk of properties qua instantiated and particulars qua  instantiating.[9]  But this of course presupposes instantiation. Moreover, there is the unwelcome consequence that the world becomes dramatically less contingent than we would have thought at first sight, for neither a concrete particular nor a property can exist without it being the case that the former has the properties it happens to have, and that the latter is instantiated by the same particulars that actually instantiate it; we get, as Mumford puts it (2007: 185), “a major new kind of necessity in the world”.