 Recently, however, both friends and foes of tropes have started to question whether tropes can be a bit of both. At any rate, this will depend on what being a property and being an object amounts to, an issue on which there is no clear consensus. Looking more closely at existing versions of the trope view, whether one thinks of one’s posit primarily as a kind of property or as a kind of object certainly influences what one takes to be true (or not) of it. To see this, compare the tropes defended by Williams, with those defended by Mulligan et al. Williams seems to belong to the camp of those who view the trope (primarily) as a kind of object. Tropes are that out of which everything else there is, is constructed. As a consequence, names for tropes should not be understood as abbreviated definite descriptions of the kind “the Φ-ness of x”. Instead, to name a trope should be likened with baptizing a child or with introducing a man “present in the flesh”, i.e., ostensively (Williams 1997[1953]: 114). Mulligan et al. (1984), on the other hand, seem to regard the trope more as a kind of property, and as a consequence of this, argue to the contrary that the correct (in fact the only) way to refer to tropes is precisely by way of expressions such as “the Φ-ness of x”. This, they claim (again pace Williams), is because tropes are essentially of some object, because they are ways the objects are (cf. also Heil 2003: 126f). In general, a theory which models its posit primarily on the property hence thinks of it as a dependent sort of entity, as of something else. And a theory which thinks of its tropes more as objects—as ‘the alphabet of being’—thinks of them as independent, either in the sense that they need not make up the things they actually make up, or—more radically—in the sense that they need not make up anything at all (that they could be so-called ‘free-floaters’).