On Doing Without Relations

Kevin Mulligan defends the view that there are relations but that all relations are internal relations. There are, according to him, no external relations, but only internal relations. He argues that true predications of external relations between things are made true by internal relations between tropes of these things. I think that he is right in claiming that one can do without external relations. Can one perhaps even do without any relations at all – even without internal relations? In what follows I shall first give further support to the thesis that there are no external relations by discussing the case of comparative statements. Then, I shall try to make sense of the notion of an internal relation and I shall suggest that internal relations are not really something over and above the terms of