Abstract
The Donkey Problem (as I am calling it) concerns the relationship between more and less fundamental ontologies. I will claim that the moral to draw from the Donkey Problem is that the less fundamental objects are merely conventional. This conventionalism has consequences for the 3D/4D debate. Four-dimensionalism is motivated by a desire to avoid coinciding objects, but once we accept that the non-fundamental ontology is conventional there is no longer any reason to reject coincidence. I therefore encourage 4Dists to become even more radical—embrace the Donkey Problem’s conventionalism and deflate the debate between 3Dists and 4Dists.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Setting aside subtleties about how to draw the boundary between concrete and non-concrete. See Lewis (1986, pp. 81–86).
Richard Woodward has pointed out to me that if the ersatzist is more inclined towards structuralism, then a sufficiently well structured multiverse could provide what is needed to count the included universes as possible worlds. For that matter, so could a sufficiently well structured universe.
Schaffer (forthcoming) and Fine (2001) would seem to be endorsing such a brute connection.
Lewis (1986, p. 156) furthers his objection to the linguistic ersatzist by pointing out that even if she succeeds she does too much. Her job was to analyze modality, not donkeyhood. My claim is precisely that the linguistic ersatzist can succeed without analyzing donkeyhood. Finish analyzing modality and then hand the donkeyhood task to the linguist.
By speaking of a rule here I am really appealing to Sidelle’s (1989) version of Kripke, not Kripke’s version.
Drawing on work of Hirsch (2002) and Sider (2001, p. 127), it may well be that in the language that includes donkey-talk quantifier phrases like ‘there are’ will not be synonymous with homophonic phrases in the minimal language that does not include donkey-talk. This so-called “quantifier variance” is suggested by the fact that there will be homophonic numerical sentences in the two languages that have different truth values. If ‘there are exactly two objects’ can be true in one language while in the same circumstances being false in the other language, it would be difficult to explain this difference without blaming the quantifier phrase. To accept quantifier variance is not yet to accept that donkeys and other conventional objects exist in a second class way, but it may lead to that conclusion. I thank Kris McDaniel and Jiri Benovsky for forcing me to see these issues.
My own version of the Vagueness Argument is explicit in its appeal to anti-coincidence. See Heller (2000).
It is worth noting, however, that nihilists would have an alternative way to avoid the worry about arbitrariness. Sider has an independent discussion of nihilism.
I use the word ‘liberalism’ rather than ‘universalism’ so as to avoid suggesting any link to universal composition, which would beg the question against the 3Dist.
Alternatively, we can make the same point without instantaneous statues if we appeal to Sider’s definition of an extended temporal part. He writes: “An extended temporal part of x during interval T may be defined as an object that exists at, but only at, times in T, is part of x at every time during T, and at every moment in T overlaps everything that is part of x at that moment. 4Dism may then be reformulated as the claim that spatiotemporal objects have temporal parts during intervals of certain sorts, perhaps extended continuous intervals. But unless otherwise noted I will think of temporal parts as being instantaneous.” (2001, p. 60.)
I do not mean to imply that everyone who rejects coincidence must be a 4Dist (my thanks to Peter van Inwagen for getting me to clarify this point), but only that the argument requires an anti-coincidence premise. For instance, a mereological essentialist may reject coincidence and still be a 3Dist. Likewise for van Inwagen’s ontology of simples and organisms. But I will not discuss anti-coincidence 3Disms further in this article.
Note how similar this sounds to the Donkey Problem of Part 1. If you are not bothered by the bruteness of the Donkey Problem, you shouldn’t be bothered by the bruteness described in the sentence to which this note is attached, and if you’re not bothered with this bruteness you should be satisfied that there is nothing to mind about coincidence.
The above discussion of coincidence was influenced by reading Wasserman (2002), even though it is not intended as an explicit response to Wasserman’s article.
There is a promising alternative way to defend 3Dism from the anti-coincidence worries. In the context of considering liberal 3Dism as one of the many adequate ontologies, Sidelle points out that the massive coincidence to which that view is committed may be a plus rather than a minus. “The extent of coincidence, I think, makes this an interesting view, because it makes coincidence so trivial. That is, since wherever you have an object, every possible criterion of identity/method of tracing is instantiated, there is no special problem saying why, for each one, it is instantiated, and coincidence follows trivially.” (2002, p. 129) Irem Kurtsal Steen makes a similar point in the context of a larger discussion of liberal 3Dism (including using liberalism to combat Sider’s Argument from Vagueness). She writes: “Diachronic Plenitude [i.e., liberalism], entails that every filled spatiotemporal region contains at least one material object (from beginning to end). Diachronic Plenitude removes all imaginable constraints from being a persisting object, including constraints about micro-physical composition and inner structure. If Plenitude is correct, then as long as a region is filled, it contains a complete persisting object, regardless of how it is filled. In other words, if Plenitude is correct, then persistence does not supervene on how a region is filled. Therefore it doesn’t supervene on microphysical facts about the contents of a region. So, Plenitude itself conflicts with the supervenience thesis, regardless of whether it is coupled with three or four-dimensionalism.” (2007, p. 174) I am not yet prepared to intelligently discuss this maneuver. I note modal relatives in Paul (2002) and McDaniel (2006).
Doug Ehring has pointed out to me that friends of tropes may still have a 3D/4D debate over the nature of tropes. Note that such a debate would not focus on coincidence, since tropes can coincide unproblematically.
For instance, Heller (1990).
In discussions of a different articles of mine, Kris McDaniel has pressed me to take up the question of whether the properties themselves are in some sense conventional—the choice between universals and tropes being, perhaps, a matter of convention. He has also pointed me in the direction of a possible approach to that question. I must leave this for future work, but it is worth noting that it is not the Donkey Problem that is forcing me to face that question.
See Sider (2001, pp. 110–113). Jonathan Schaffer, in “Spacetime the One Substance,” (manuscript; presented at the Rutgers conference on Mereology, Topology, and Location) argues for “monistic substantivalism” which he characterizes thus: “The alternative is to identify material objects with regions. On this alternative there is only one pertinent sort of substance (and thus no need for occupation connections). When God makes the world, God need only create the spacetime (then God can pin the fundamental properties directly to the spacetime). So says the monistic substantivalist.” You may also recognize in that passage the fundamental ontology I am describing in the present article. I note that despite any plausibility there may be to identifying hunks with regions, there is an extra layer of difficulty involved when attempting to identify donkeys with regions. Given the problems of vagueness, including the problem of the many, if you do not want to be an epistemicist, it will not be easy to identify a given donkey with any particular region. This does not threaten the claim that the fundamental ontology includes just regions with properties pinned to them. But it does appear that a genuine one to one identification would be required in order to support the non-conventionality of donkeys in the way I am considering in the body of this article.
I hope to have more to say about the relationship between counterpart theory and conventionality in “Conventionalism and 4Dism” (in progress).
Note that the 3Dist need not avoid counterpart theory or similar mechanisms. The combination of 3Dism and counterpart theory is unusual but not unheard of. See, for instance, Wasserman (2002).
References
Balashov, Y. (1999). Relativistic objects. Noûs, 33, 644–662.
Fine, K. (2001). The question of realism. Philosophers’ Imprint, 1, 1–30.
Hawthorne, J. (Ed.). (2006). Three-dimensionalism. In Metaphysical essays (pp. 85–109). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Heller, M. (1990). The ontology of physical objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heller, M. (1998a). Property counterparts in ersatz worlds. Journal of Philosophy, 95, 293–316.
Heller, M. (1998b). Five layers of interpretation for possible worlds. Philosophical Studies, 90, 205–214.
Heller, M. (2000). Temporal overlap is not coincidence. Monist, 83, 362–380.
Hirsch, E. (2002). Quantifier-variance and realism. Philosophical Issues, 36, 51–73.
Kurtsal Steen, I. (2007). Composition, vagueness, and persistence. PhD. Dissertation, Syracuse University.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
McDaniel, K. (2006). Modal realisms. In J. Hawthorne (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives 20: Metaphysics (pp. 303–31). Cambridge: Blackwell.
Paul, L. A. (2002). Logical parts. Noûs, 36, 578–596.
Schaffer, J. On what grounds what. In D. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Sidelle, A. (1989). Necessity, essence, and individuation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sidelle A. (2002). Is there a true metaphysics of material objects? Philosophical Issues, 36, 118–145.
Sider, T. (2001). Four-dimensionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank participants at the Ovronnaz Metaphysics Workshop, especially Jiri Benovsky, Fabrice Correia, John Divers, Philipp Keller, and Richard Woodward, and the audience at SMU, especially Eric Barnes, Doug Ehring, Robert Howell, and Steve Sverdlik. This article in some sense evolved out of “The Conventionality of the 3D/4D Debate” which was presented at Idaho State University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Colorado, and I would like to thank those audiences. I am also grateful for helpful conversations with, Daniel Nolan and my colleagues Andre Gallois and Kris McDaniel.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Heller, M. The Donkey Problem. Philos Stud 140, 83–101 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9227-z
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9227-z