Abstract
It’s widely accepted that we have most reason to accept theories that best fulfill the following naturalistically respectable criteria: (1) internal consistency, (2) consistency with the facts, and (3) exemplification of the theoretical virtues. It’s also widely accepted that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. I argue that if you accept the aforementioned criteria, you have most reason to reject that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. By applying the criteria to worlds that are all prima facie possible, I show that contingent local matters of particular fact partly determine which theory of composition we should accept at a world. For instance, I argue that when we apply the criteria to our world, we should accept Mereological Nihilism. Furthermore, even if you think that the worlds I mention, such as gunky worlds, are impossible, you should still reject the brute principle that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. Instead, you should only accept that a theory of composition is necessarily true if contingent local matters of particular fact at possible worlds cannot tell in favor of one theory of composition over another.
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Notes
I’ve omitted existence monism (which holds that there is only one object; the world) because, on my nuanced definition of Nihilism in Sect. 2, it’s a kind of Nihilism.
I’m using the phrase ‘local matters of particular fact’ in the same manner as David Lewis. Lewis explains “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing after another…we have a geometry: a system of external relations of spatio-temporal distance between points, maybe points of space–time itself, maybe point sized bits of matter, or aether or fields, maybe both. And at those points we have local qualities. And that is all. There is no difference without a difference in the arrangement of qualities" (Lewis 1986, pp. ix–xi).
Perhaps a theoretical virtue is a theory being able to claim that much of our perceptual data is veridical. I will address this worry below in my discussion of conservatism.
This is contentious. Descartes and Van Inwagen (1990) think we can confirm our own existence by conducting a sort of empirical test: thinking. I contend that our language and our perceptions don’t give us the kind of evidence required to choose between Nihilism, Restrictivism, and Universalism. This will become clear when I discuss conservatism and minimal truthmakers.
See Quine and Ullian (1930/1978, pp. 40–41) for a similar explication of conservatism and further discussion.
See Cameron (2010) for a discussion of minimal truthmaking.
According to the minimal truthmaker, tables and people aren’t members of the correct ontology because only particles must be members of the correct ontology for that ontology to be externally consistent. Particles make true all the true sentences that mention ‘tables’ or ‘people’, so neither tables nor people are minimal truthmakers.
I add the modifier ‘almost’ to allow for the inevitability that some of what we consider ‘existing knowledge’ is false.
By calling the existence of a simple a ‘brute existence fact’ I’m not claiming there aren’t causal explanations for the existence of the simple and its location in space–time. I’m only claiming the existence of that simple can’t be explained by the existence of its parts.
One might object by claiming that composite objects are all non-natural kinds and only natural kinds count when considering which theory posits more or less kinds. So, Universalism, Restrictivism and Nihilism are all equally parsimonious because they posit the same number of natural kinds (Thanks to…for this objection). However, this objection fails to get at the theoretical virtue a parsimony principle should get at. The spirit of parsimony is to omit from one’s ontology those things that don’t do theoretical work. Non-natural kinds come for free according to this objection whether or not they do any theoretical work.
My argument that composite objects must be of a different kind than simple objects doesn’t depend on any particular view of simples.
If the theory that posits gunk has more explanatory power given results from the empirical sciences, then we wouldn’t have most reason to accept Nihilism at our world. The debate would not merely turn on parsimony. I’m assuming the current empirical data doesn’t support the claim that there is gunk at our world. Perhaps, for example, if everything was easily splittable and new particles were being discovered all of the time, then the empirical data would give us more reason to accept gunk at our world. It’s unclear what empirical data would support gunk over simples.
Nolan (1997) argues for something like this.
Merricks (2001, pp. 56–84) endorses a similar principle.
Merricks (2001, pp. 56–84) presents the full argument. He rejects Nihilism as he thinks consciousness is an emergent property. I agree that we should accept objects with emergent properties into our ontology, but I don’t think there are emergent properties at our world. I think consciousness can be accounted for by the properties of the particles that make up certain brains. I cannot develop this point in the present paper.
Cowling (2012) denies that composition is an additional ideological kind. His argument relies on the claims that identity and composition are of the same kind and all plausible theories must accept identity as a primitive ideological commitment. I reject both claims, but I won’t discuss Cowling’s thesis further here.
McDaniel (2020) suggests this as his motivation for taking ideological parsimony to be a theoretical virtue (This is Metaphysics, chapters 2.10, 4.5).
Cameron (2007) also argues that composition is contingent. Unlike Cameron, my argument doesn’t entail that there are two particle-for-particle duplicate possible worlds where at one world, one theory of composition is true and at the other world, a second theory of composition is true.
This exercise is done from our world. At our world, one first considers what one should accept at our world (without considering any other possible world), then what one should believe at W1, then at W2, etc. I’m assuming S5 as our modal logic.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this alternate theory for determining when we should accept a modal claim.
One might think a minimal theory of metaphysics will always include MPA, but the reader should note that the theory of metaphysics this paper employs doesn’t appeal to MPA.
Thanks to Mark Heller, Kris McDaniel, Dan Korman, André Gallois, Fran Fairbairn, and Kendall England, for their helpful feedback on this paper. This paper also benefitted from the feedback I received at The Graduate Women in Metaphysics Conference (2016), the Canadian Philosophical Association conference (2016), the Fifth Italian Conference in Analytic Ontology and the concurrent workshop on contingentism (2016), and Metaphysical Mayhem (2016). Thanks to the participants at these conferences.
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Dershowitz, N. Nihilism, But Not Necessarily. Erkenn 87, 2441–2456 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00311-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00311-7