 Before proceeding, it is worth pointing out that the One Over Many argument described above can be simplified. As Michael Devitt (1980) points out, the appeal to resemblance, or to multiple things having a given property, is a red herring. On the traditional formulation, nominalists are challenged to account for the following fact: the ball is red and the hat is red. But if nominalists can account for the fact that the ball is red, then presumably, they can simply repeat the same sort of explanation in connection with the hat, and they will have accounted for the fact that both things are red. Thus, the real challenge for the nominalist is to explain simple predicative facts, e.g., the fact that the ball is red, without appealing to properties, e.g., redness. More generally, they need to show how we can account for the truth of sentences of the form ‘a is F’ without appealing to a property of  Fness.[2]