In Sutton 2012, Catherine Sutton offers a new and very interesting solution to the most challenging problem facing colocationism: the grounding problem. However, if I am right in rejecting her thesis that lumps or pieces of matter are extrinsically composed, then her proposal is no longer a complete answer to the grounding problem, and it is difficult to see how it might be supplemented.
In the past few years, deflationary positions in the debate on the nature of composite material objects have become prominent. According to Ted Sider these include the thesis of quantifier variance, against which he has defended ontological realism.Recently, Sider has considered the possibility of rejecting his arguments against the vagueness of the unrestricted quantifiers in terms of translation functions. Against this strategy, he has presented an intuitive complaint and has argued that it can only be resisted if quantifier variance is accepted. But this is false. In this paper I argue, against Sider, that there is a coherent way to combine the rejection of quantifier variance with the vagueness of the unrestricted quantifiers. I sketch a model to show this, and then I consider, on the basis of it, several versions of the indeterminacy argument against the vagueness of the unrestricted quantifiers that Sider has formulated over the years.
Let us consider a statue and the piece of clay out of which it is made, and let us suppose that they start to exist and cease to exist at exactly the same time. According to colocationism, the statue and the piece of clay are two different objects: they have different properties (for example, one is a statue and the other a piece of clay) and, according to Leibniz’s Law, the same object cannot have different properties. One of the most difficult questions for colocationism is that of the grounding problem: given that the statue and the piece of clay share many of their properties (their matter, their microscopic composition, their structure, etc.), what is it that grounds the fact that they have different sortal (or modal) properties? Recently, Catherine Sutton has offered a very interesting answer to the question. However, as I will argue, it cannot be applied to all cases of colocated objects and therefore, it is not an adequate solution to the grounding problem. The main objective of this paper is to present a new solution to the grounding problem that integrates some of Sutton’s theses, but that allows us to give a complete answer to the question. To do this, the notion of a process of coming into existence will be crucial. After presenting the new proposal, I will compare it with the proposals by Kit Fine and Noël Saenz.
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