Metaphysical arguments against ordinary objects

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 224, 2006, Pages 340-359

  Thomasson, Amie L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI   (United States)

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EID: 60949191352     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2006.00446.x     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Originally expressed in Plato's Sophist (247E) and more recently by Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, Vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1927), p. 8
2. Jaegwon Kim has recently popularized the principle under the name 'Alexander's dictum': see his Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 348
3. T. Merricks, Objects and Persons (Oxford UP, 2001), p. 81
4. P. van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990), p. 122
5. Merricks, Objects and Persons, p. 56
6. But see E.J. Lowe, 'In Defense of Moderate-Sized Specimens of Dry Goods', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67 (2003), pp. 704-10, for an interesting way of calling into question the assumption that the atoms can be said to cause (collectively) whatever one wanted to say the baseball causes
7. G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 16-22
8. Ryle, 'Categories', repr. in his Collected Papers, Vol. II (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1971), p. 181
9. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard UP, 1989), p. 37
10. Strawson, 'On Referring', Mind, 59 (1950), pp. 320-44, at p. 330
11. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford UP, 1962), pp. 50-1
12. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 1-21
13. Stalnaker, 'Presuppositions', Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2 (1973), pp. 447-57, at p. 451
14. Stalnaker, 'Presuppositions', p. 448
15. S. Soames 'Presupposition', in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Vol. IV: Topics in the Philosophy of Language (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989), p. 558
16. Theodore Sider similarly points out that the supposed overdetermination of the baseball and its atoms does not parallel unexplained coincidences, and uses this as part of an argument that the former provides no reason for rejecting ordinary objects. See his 'What's So Bad about Overdetermination?', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67 (2003), pp. 719-26
17. Kim, Supervenience and Mind, p. 250; my italics
18. Yablo, 'Mental Causation', repr. in D.J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 179-96, at p. 183
19. Material Beings, pp. 102, 105, 109
20. I argue elsewhere that the existence of statues trivially supervenes on the existence of atoms arranged statuewise, on any acceptable way of spelling out the conditions on which ordinary claims about statues are 'nearly as good as true': see my 'Ontological Minimalism', American Philosophical Quarterly, 38 (2001), pp. 319-31
21. See Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 17
22. While overdetermination arguments against ordinary objects resemble causal exclusion arguments in philosophy of mind, it is not clear that the above defence could be directly applied to the case of mental states. For many would deny that there are analytic entailments between claims about physiological states and claims about mental states paralleling those I have identified for claims about atoms arranged baseballwise and baseballs. See, e.g., D.J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford UP, 1996), p. 71
23. 'Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence', Facta Philosophica, 2 (2000), pp. 249-70, at p. 257
24. Soames, 'Presupposition', p. 558
25. D. Wiggins, 'On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time', Philosophical Review, 77 (1986), pp. 90-5, at p. 94
26. M. Heller, The Ontology of Physical Objects (Cambridge UP, 1990), p. 14
27. See D. Zimmerman, 'Theories of Masses and Problems of Constitution', Philosophical Review, 104 (1995), pp. 87-8
28. M.C. Rea, 'Supervenience and Co-Location', American Philosophical Quarterly, 34 (1997), pp. 367-75, at p. 368
29. For discussion of the grounding problem, see, e.g., Zimmerman, 'Theories of Masses and Problems of Constitution'
30. M. Burke, 'Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper: a Challenge to the Standard Account', Analysis, 52 (1992), pp. 12-17
31. K. Bennett, 'Spatiotemporal Coincidence and the Grounding Problem', Philosophical Studies, 118 (2004), pp. 339-71
32. See Rea, 'Supervenience and Co-location'
33. L.R. Baker, Persons and Bodies (Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 167-79
34. For discussion of sorites problems, see P. Unger, 'There Are No Ordinary Things', Synthese, 41 (1979), pp. 117-54
35. Horgan and Potrč, 'Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence'