 The tropist will reject these states of affairs with universals as constituents and rather urge that there are two distinct tropes, the redness of \(a\) and the redness of \(b\), which play a theoretical role analogous to the one that the universalist would invoke for such states of affairs. Hence, tropists claim that tropes can be causal relata (D. Williams 1953) and truthmakers (Mulligan, Simons, &amp; Smith 1984).