Abstract
In The Fragmentation of Being, Kris McDaniel argues for ontological pluralism, proposing that we should accept not just being itself but also modes of being into which being fragments. McDaniel’s guiding idea is that being is analogous, and given the analogy of being, being should be taken to fragment into modes of being. I argue that even if McDaniel is right that being is analogous, ontological pluralism is not forced upon us. Given the analogy of being, objects don’t have being simpliciter but have it in virtue of having something more fundamental particular to them. Upon examination, this falls short of supporting ontological pluralism, for the analogy of being implies that there are many grounds of being, but we are given no good reason for taking grounds of being as modes of being.
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Notes
Kripke (1980).
Fine (1994).
McDaniel (2017). All subsequent page numbers cited parenthetically in the text are from this book.
But isn’t it the case that {Socrates} exists always at a time when Socrates exists? We may say that {Socrates} exists at a time but not primarily and only in a derivative sense – in the sense that {Socrates} bears a membership relation to Socrates who primarily exists at a time.
McDaniel calls these two kinds of existence ‘being-there’ and ‘subsistence’ (p. 63).
In Chapter 1, McDaniel offers a characterization of analogical expression: “I will call an expression analogical just in case it has a generic sense, which, roughly, applies to objects of different sorts in virtue of those objects exemplifying different features” (p. 17). If we replace ‘analogical expression’ by ‘analogical property’, we will get a characterization of analogical property. It is worth examining whether this characterization of analogical property is equivalent to (AG). But I will assume that the two are equivalent.
According to the suggestion made above, the fact that Socrates exists or is an object is fully grounded in the fact that Socrates is a person. It might be thought that this account of existence can’t be right because the fact that Socrates is a person does not entail that Socrates exists (See Fine 2005). My suggestion is based on two claims: the Aristotelian thesis and the neo-Quinean thesis. If one thinks that the fact that Socrates exists is not fully grounded in the fact that he is a person, I think it is the neo-Quinean thesis that should be blamed.
(M2) is an instance of the more general thesis McDaniel presupposes, according to which any object that has a certain mode of existence essentially has that mode of existence.
The lesson from the current discussion can be generalized even further. The fact that a property F is analogous alone does not show that there are many kinds or modes of F. Thus, even if F is analogous—i.e. even if there are properties G1, G2, …, Gn such that each of them is more natural than F, and necessarily anything with one of them is F, in order to defend pluralism about F, one needs to further argue that G1, G2, …, Gn are not reducibly understood in terms of properties that have nothing to do with F. But it is not my intention to suggest that McDaniel’s arguments for other sorts of pluralism such as compositional pluralism are subject to the same criticism.
References
Fine, K. (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1–16.
Fine, K. (2005). Necessity and non-existence. In His Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers. Oxford University Press, 321–54.
Fine, K. (2012). Guide to Ground. In Correia, F., and Schnieder, B. (eds.) Metaphysical Grounding. Cambridge University Press, 37–80.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
Lowe, E. J. (2009). More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms. Wiley-Blackwell.
McDaniel, K. (2017). The Fragmentation of Being, Oxford University Press.
McGinn, C. (2000). Logical Properties. Clarendon Press.
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Han, S. From the analogy of being to modes of being?. Philos Stud 179, 3133–3139 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01798-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01798-2