A Worldview

Chapter 10 briefly articulates the worldview that’s implied (or at least suggested) by the rest of the book. Very roughly, the idea is that neo-positivists can articulate their worldview with a counterfactual that says something roughly like the following: “If there had been a plenitudinous platonic realm (i.e., a plenitudinous realm of abstract objects like numbers and sets and propositions and so on), and if a certain kind of mereological universalism had been true (in particular, if there had existed a huge plurality of tiny mereological simples and unrestricted compositions of those simples, so that there were, e.g., simples arranged tablewise and catwise and moleculewise and so on, and there were also tables and cats and molecules and trout-turkeys and so on), then quantum mechanics would have been true, and evolution theory would have been true, and Zermelo-Frankel set theory would have been true, and so on.”

Non-Factualism about Composite Objects (or Why There’s No Fact of the Matter Whether Any Material Objects Exist)

Chapter 4 provides an argument for a non-factualist view of the composite-object question; i.e., it argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as composite objects like tables and rocks and cats (where a composite object is an object that has proper parts). In addition, this chapter explains how the argument can be extended to establish the much more general (and much more radical) conclusion that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any material objects at all—including mereological simples (i.e., objects that don’t have any proper parts). The argument proceeds by undermining the necessitarian and contingentist views of the composite-object question; so, roughly speaking, the idea is that there isn’t a fact of the matter about the existence of composite objects like tables because there isn’t a necessary fact about this and there also isn’t a contingent fact about it.

Natural Objects

ABSTRACT:This paper introduces a framework for thinking about ontological questions—in particular, the Special Composition Question—and shows how the framework might help support something like an account of restricted composition. The framework takes the form of an account of natural objects, in analogy with David Lewis's account of natural properties. Objects, like properties, come in various metaphysical grades, from the fundamental, fully objective, perfectly natural objects to the nomologically otiose, maximally gerrymandered, perfectly non-natural objects. The perfectly natural objects, I argue, are the mereological simples, and (roughly) a collection composes an object of degree-n naturalness if and only if its members are arranged F-wise, for some property F that appears in the degree-n natural laws. Arbitrary composites turn out to be perfectly non-natural objects and are metaphysical bystanders. Ordinary composite objects fall in between. Some—e.g., atoms—are very (though not perfectly) natural; others—e.g., tables—are highly non-natural.