 Unfortunately, as soon as the sense in which tropes are abstract has been thus disambiguated, it becomes less clear in what sense being told that tropes are abstract informs us about their (unique) nature. For isn’t it true of anything (short of everything) that attending to it involves abstracting it away from the surrounding environment?[8] To further confuse matters, quite a few trope proponents (cf. e.g., Küng 1967 and Giberman 2014) characterize the trope as concrete, and Simons (1994: 557) thinks tropes are both abstract and concrete. The trope’s nature is hence not easy to pin down. To further demonstrate this fact, the rest of this section surveys debates on what kind of thing the trope is, whether the trope is (in)dependent of the object that ‘has’ it, whether tropes can be simple, and how best to individuate tropes.