Physical-Object Ontology, Verbal Disputes, and Common Sense

Abstract

Two main claims are defended in this paper: first, that typical disputes in the literature about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal; second, that the proper way to resolve these disputes is by appealing to common sense or ordinary language. A verbal dispute is characterized not in terms of private idiolects. but in terms of different linguistic communities representing different positions. If we imagine a community that makes Chisholm's mereological essentialist assertions, and another community that makes Lewis's four-dimensionalist assertions, the members of each community speak the truth in their respective languages. This follows from an application of the principle of interpretive charity to the two communities.' Rudolph Camap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956).PHYSICAL-OBJECT ONTOLOGY, VERBAL DISPUTES, AND COMMON SENSE 67 physical-object ontology, that all sides to a dispute have at their disposal constructions involving sets (or properties).Questions about the ontology of physical objects have been prominent in the recent literature. Some of the doctrines that have been most frequently debated include the following:Nihilism. There are no composite objectse2Quasi-Nihilism. Some few composite objects exist, including persons and perhaps some other living things, but there are no tables, ships, mountains, rivers, planets, pebbles, leaves, eyes, or almost any other of the variety of composite objects that people ordinarily seem to be talking about.' Mereological Essentialism. An object cannot persist with any of its parts replaced4The doctrine of mereological sums. Any two objects compose an object.The doctrine of temporal parts. If an object persists through an interval of time, there is a temporal part of the object that exists only during that interval and that spatially coincides with the object during that interval. Four-dimensionalism. This is the conjunction of the doctrines of mereological sums and temporal parts. It implies that, if we start with the objects ordinarily talked about, any sum of temporal parts of these objects, however discontinuous or gerrymandering, constitutes an object on a par with them.' Nihilism is discussed (and rejected) in Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), ch. 8. Nihilism may be suggested in Peter Unger, "There Are No Ordinary Things", Syntlrese 41 (1980), 117-54. The dispute over nihilism that I view as verbal occurs when both sides agree that there are simples and disagree about whether there are composites. As Theodore Sider pointed out to me, my arguments in this paper do not seem to imply that the question whether there are simples is verbal-a question which, it may be noted, is not about the existence of highly visible objects. Cf. Sider's "Van Inwagen and the Possibility of Gunk",Analysis, 53 (1993), 285-89. See also note 29, below. Two quasi-nihilists are van Inwagen, Material Beings, and Trenton Merricks, Objects and ...

Relational and Substantival Ontologies, and the Nature and the Role of Primitives in Ontological Theories

“…In between these two 'extreme' views lie two 'moderate' ones. Bennett (2008) defends an epistemicist view that claims that at least some metaphysical questions have genuine objective answers but that often we cannot discover them and that consequently there is often little reason or no reason at all to go for one side rather than the other, and Hirsch (2005Hirsch ( , 2007Hirsch ( , 2008) defends a moderate anti-realist view that claims that many metaphysical debates are merely verbal disputes where the disputants seem to claim different things but in fact they are making the same claims only formulated in different ways, or different languages. It is these two latter views that I will be most interested in.…”

“…I leave it then an open question whether this terminological difference can be a good reason to prefer one side over the other. Hirsch (2005Hirsch ( , 2007Hirsch ( , 2008, when making an equivalence claim about the debate between perdurantists and endurantists, insists that while there is only terminological difference between the two sides of the debate, the endurantist language is closer to ordinary language and so should be preferred. Alternatively, one can see closeness of theoretical terminology to ordinary language as irrelevant and simply claim that it does not matter at all which side of the debate one chooses to embrace-or better, that we should simply refrain from choosing.…”

Endurance, Perdurance and Metaontology

“…As a consequence, it becomes difficult to motivate the decision to choose one side over the other. There are also moderate anti-realists, such as Hirsch (2005Hirsch ( , 2007Hirsch ( , 2008, who claim that many metaphysical debates are merely verbal disputes where the disputants seem to be saying different things but in fact they are making the same claims only formulated in different ways, or different "alternative" languages. In Benovsky (2008), I have argued that a kind of this moderate anti-realism applies to the debate between the bundle theory and the substratum theory.…”

HowDoThings Persist? Location Relations in Physics and the Metaphysics of Persistence

“…31 For such complaints see (e.g.) McCall andLowe (2003), Miller (2005), Hirsch (2005Hirsch ( , 2009). object (as described by physics) and a spatial region.…”