Russell and Price Discuss Universals and Resemblances

Bertrand Russell objects to Resemblance Nominalism in the following way: The notion of resemblance is a relation between two or more things; a relation is a universal; therefore resemblance is a universal. He contends that Nominalists who admit there are resemblances are admitting to a relation between things, and once we’ve got resemblance as a universal, it is reasonable to suppose that there are other universals as well. H. H. Price argues against both premises in his article, but the more convincing one is that where he argues that resemblance is not a relation. He says that it is much more “fundamental” than relations, and indeed, relations are built upon resemblances. For example, take a room-house complex and a match-matchbox complex. Both pairs resemble each other, and therefore the relation “being inside of” comes out of that resemblance. He also says that the Philosophy of Universals doesn’t even hold that resemblances are relations; they are actually used to describe the way something instantiates a universal. If A resembles B and C, this is because they are all instances of the same universal; there is no relation there.
Denying that resemblance is a relation seems like a plausible way for the Nominalist to go, however it is not without its problems. We might use the word resemble to mean the whole relationship of two or more objects that are instances of a single universal. It seems like resemblance would be stronger if the objects had more universals in common and weaker if they had only one or two universals in common. Resemblance still seems to be some sort of relation between objects and universals. It still seems to me that this is a better choice than saying resemblance is just a brute fact because it doesn’t fully answer the question of why things resemble each other.