In Defence of Ordinary Objects and a Naturalistic Answer to the Special Composition Question

The Bound State Answer to the Special Composition Question

“…This exhausts the core of the Let us then move on to discuss the reasons in favor of the BSA, or its "virtues" as I shall call them. McKenzie and Muller (2017) lists four of them, two of which are discussed by Waechter and Ladyman (2019) as well. I shall label them (i) Moderation, Conservativeness, and Extensional Adequacy, (ii) Precision, (iii) Simplicity, and (iv) Parsimony.…”

“…I find the reasons they give in favor of the BSA controversial. Waechter and Ladyman (2019) appeal to some of those same reasons and suggest others as well. I am prepared to concede that those other reasons do provide support for the BSA.…”

“…Metaphysical considerations should be sensitive to insights from empirical sciences. The main focus of this paper will be on the so-called Bound State Answer (BSA), suggested in McKenzie (2011), and recently advocated in McKenzie and Muller (2017), and Waechter and Ladyman (2019). However, before we enter into some of its details, it is worth introducing another physics-based answer, namely the entanglement answer.…”

“…According to such an answer, ψ amounts to "being in a (common) bound state". While the formulations of the BSA due to McKenzie and Muller (2017), and Waechter and Ladyman (2019) differ in details the spirit is very much the same. I will mostly follow McKenzie and Muller (2017) for a simple reason.…”

“…8 Given that I will be mostly-but not exclusively-concerned with the reasons in favor of the BSA, rather than with details of formulation, I will stick mostly to McKenzie and Muller (2017). That being said, the discussion will give me the chance to deal with Waecther and Ladyman (2019) as well.…”