Relational Roles and Qua-individuals

In this paper we present and compare two different ap- proaches to the notion of "relational role" and connected is- sues. Both approaches are based on the introduction of the notion of "qua-individual" and on the reification of relations. We use a classical problem in the literature on roles, namely the counting problem, as testbed, and we show how the two approaches deal with it in a similar way. We nevertheless show that they are to be distinguished, examining several as- pects emerging from their relation with the notion of trope.