Something is temporally flexible if its “intrinsic” non-relational properties are changeable over time. Houses are temporally flexible in that something remains the same house even if it is internally remodeled, or has its roof replaced. ” Something possesses this property if it comes into and goes out of existence. Individual buildings are obviously temporal, being erected and demolished at particular times. Continuants have these three properties because of the relationship in which they stand to their embodiments.

Something possesses this property if it comes into and goes out of existence. Individual buildings are obviously temporal, being erected and demolished at particular times. Continuants have these three properties because of the relationship in which they stand to their embodiments. An embodiment of a continuant is a spatio-temporally locatable object or event, and the continuant itself is a “higher level” object that depends for its existence upon its embodiments. Take again our example of the house.

24 But, as we have seen, if the type-token theory is understood in the way that sonicists and instrumentalists understand it, we cannot easily account for either the creatability of performable works or their possession of properties that depend upon their contexts of creation. This suggests the following compromise: performable works, we might say, are indeed types, but they are types that are by their very nature contextualized and, as a consequence, creatable. This is Levinson’s own strategy (see Levinson 1980).