On Ostrich Nominalism

In Against Ostrich Nominalism  of 14 January 2013 Bill opens with

As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility any other human pursuit, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. (This is true of other disciplines as well, but in philosophy it is true in excelsis.) Suppose I say, as I have in various places:

That things have properties and stand in relations I take to be a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. ‘Black’ picks out a property, an extralinguistic feature of my cat. 

Is that obvious? Not to some. Not to the ornery and recalcitrant critter known as the ostrich nominalist. My cat, Max Black, is black. That, surely, is a Moorean fact. Now consider the following biconditional and consider whether it too is a Moorean fact: 

1. Max is black iff Max has the property of being black. 

As I see it, there are three main ways of construing a biconditional such as (1):

A. Ostrich Nominalism. The right-hand side (RHS) says exactly what the left-hand side (LHS) says, but in a verbose and high-falutin' and dispensable way. Thus the use of 'property' on the RHS does not commit one ontologically to properties beyond predicates. (By definition, predicates are linguistic items while properties are extralinguistic and extramental.) Predication is primitive and in need of no philosophical explanation. On this approach, (1) is trivially true. One needn't posit properties, and in consequence one needn't worry about the nature of property-possession. (Is Max related to his blackness, or does Max have his blackness quasi-mereologically by having it as an ontological constituent of him?)

Bill then goes on to define two further construals of (1) which he calls ostrich realism and non-ostrich realism.  So far I'm an ostrich nominalist.  I can't better Bill's characterisation of the RHS of (1) as verbose, high-falutin, and dispensable.  However, he then says

On (A) there are neither properties, nor do properties enter into any explanation of predication. Predication is primitive and in need of no explanation. In virtue of what does 'black' correctly apply to Max? In virtue of nothing. It just applies to him and does so correctly. Max is black, but there is no feature of reality that explains why 'black' is true of Max, or why 'Max is black' is true. It is just true! There is nothing in reality that serves as the ontological ground of this contingent truth. Nothing 'makes' it true. There are no truth-makers and no need for any. 

Bill finds this preposterous.  But does it follow from (A)?  Can we hang on to the better part of (A)---avoiding the descent into the quagmire of the ontology of properties---yet escape the vacuity Bill finds?  I think so.  Let's change the example a little.  Suppose Max has his hind legs bent at the knee, his haunches on the floor supporting his weight, his spine inclined, and his forelegs straight and near vertical.  In these circumstances we would truly say 'Max is sitting' because 'sitting' is the right word to describe Max's attitude and the disposition of his limbs.  Would Bill want to say, Yes, Max is sitting, but there is no feature of reality that explains why 'sitting' is true of Max or why 'Max is sitting' is true?  I guess it depends on what kind of 'feature of reality' we are looking for.  If it has to be 'thing-like' then perhaps, yes, he would.  But it seems to me that we cannot capture reality by simply piling up things, despite the pressure language puts upon us to talk in terms of 'things'.  Is the problem that we can't analyse 'black' analogously to the analysis of 'sitting'?  Well, we could say that 'black' is the right word to describe the sensation caused in us by the light, or rather the paucity of light, reaching our eyes from Max.  But this clearly opens up a whole new realm of questions.  My inclination is to see this as a puzzle about language, not a puzzle about reality.