Abstract
One of the main motivations for compositional nihilism, the view that there are no composite material objects, concerns the many puzzles and problems associated with them. Nihilists claim that eliminating composites provides a unified solution to a slew of varied, difficult problems. However, numerous philosophers have questioned whether this is really so. While nihilists clearly avoid the usual, composite-featuring formulations of the puzzles, the concern is that the commitments that generate the problems are not eliminated along with composites. If this is correct, it severely undercuts the motivation for the view. However, I argue that it is not correct. The aim of this paper is to explain exactly how and why eliminating composites dissolves substantive metaphysical puzzles. More generally, I aim to clarify the nihilist’s ontological commitments and the scope of the paraphrase strategy she employs.
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Notes
A nihilist about objects need not be a compositional nihilist; a stronger version of nihilism eliminates simples as well as composites, leaving us with an ontology of unindividuated material “stuff”. This view is explored by Sidelle (1998: Sects. 4–6), Turner (2011), and Cowling (2014). However, here I am only concerned with compositional nihilism and will use ‘nihilism’ to refer to compositional nihilism, specifically.
Van Inwagen (1990) and Merricks (2001) are prominent defenders of severely restrictive accounts of composition. Both claim that composition occurs in some cases (for van Inwagen, when the simples compose a life, and for Merricks, when they compose a person) and so, are not strictly nihilists. However, for the sake of simplicity, and because it does not matter for my purposes here, I will sometimes speak as if they are nihilists. Other philosophers who have defended nihilist, or near-nihilist views about composition include Hossack (2000), Dorr (2005), Grupp (2006), Cameron (2008, 2010), Horgan and Potrč (2000, 2008, ch. 7), Sider (2013), and Contessa (2014). Horgan and Potrč defend monism, according to which the material world is one simple object.
See Bennett (2009) for a discussion of the ways in which nihilists try to minimize the differences between their ontology and the believer’s as to make nihilism maximally plausible. Bennett argues that this minimization may backfire; if the nihilist’s substantive claims are too thin, then it is unclear that or how she solves many of the puzzles that plague believers.
Rettler (2018) has also argued that compositional nihilism is not properly motivated by puzzles about composites, but his challenge differs from the one I am concerned to address here. Rettler argues that a great many of the problems nihilists claim to dissolve can be run on individual, extended simples, whereas the sorts of “puzzle rebound” arguments I discuss here target the nihilist’s commitment to providing composite-free paraphrases using the arranged Fwise predicate.
My aim is to defend the nihilist from the charge that eliminating composites does not solve problems. However, I am not defending the view that nihilism is the only position that can solve these problems (nor am I setting out to defend nihilism in general).
Some nihilists, for example, van Inwagen (1990), claim that, despite appearances, composite-featuring sentences express literally true propositions. This does not, however, obviate the need for paraphrases because he still needs to explain exactly what proposition is expressed by positive composite-featuring sentences of ordinary English. And in fact, it is van Inwagen who first tried to work out how the nihilist should paraphrase composite-featuring sentences. So regardless of whether one is a “Hermeneutic” nihilist like van Inwagen or a “revisionary” nihilist who says that composite-featuring sentences are literally false (e.g., Merricks 2001), she needs paraphrases (I take the “revisionary versus hermeneutic” terminology from Bennett (2009), who correctly points out that the distinction seems to be a semantic and not metaphysical one (Bennett 2009, Sect. 5)).
However, it seems that some nihilists understand the view as a thesis about what fundamentally exists, where endorsing nihilism on this level does not involve saying anything is wrong with folk belief about composites. Daniel Korman calls this view “deep nihilism”. See Korman (2015a, b, ch. 6) for an extensive discussion of this idea. Those who seem as if they might endorse deep nihilism are Dorr (2005), Sider (2004, 2011, 2013), and Cameron (2008, 2010), although the commitment is not clear. In any case, my concern here is with “regular” nihilism and not deep nihilism.
This method of paraphrase was originally proposed by van Inwagen (1990) and has been employed by many nihilists since.
The idea of factuality has been discussed by Yablo (1998), Sider (1999), Rayo and Yablo (2001), Schiffer (2003), and McGrath (2005). McGrath devotes the first half of his paper to working out a detailed account of factuality. For my purposes, the details of his account do not matter (although, everything I say is consistent with the account he develops).
The large literature on the Special Composition Question was jump-started by van Inwagen’s discussion and treatment of the question in Material Beings (1990), although he first discusses the question in an earlier paper (see van Inwagen 1987) and credits Hestevold (1981) with being the first present-day philosopher to ask and address question (see van Inwagen 1990, p. 287 n. 14).
To be clear, I mean that the task of finding an informative answer to the SCQ that saves all and only ordinary objects is generally taken to be insurmountable, not the task of justifying that such an ontology is correct nor the task of providing an informative answer to the SCQ (which van Inwagen thinks he does). Proponents of commonsense ontologies (i.e., ontologies on which all and only ordinary objects exist) have argued that such an ontology might be correct even if there is no informative answer to the SCQ that can validate it. For example, see Markosian (1998) and Korman (2010).
Tallant goes a step farther than Bennett. Bennett explicitly states that she is not claiming that the nihilist cannot provide an adequate answer the SAQ; rather, she says that she is just raising a challenge to the nihilist by pointing out that it is not obvious that or how the nihilist can do this (see Bennett 2009, p. 70). Elder (2011) and Unger (2014) have also suggested that the nihilist cannot give an adequate explanation of what it means to say that simples are “arranged Fwise” (and so, that she can’t answer the SAQ).
See Brenner (2015, pp. 1304–1305) for an argument that Tallant’s argument employing Globalisation must be wrong because it proves too much.
Brenner suggests that there are several adequate answers the nihilist could give and the fictionalist answer is among these. However, he does not endorse any one of these answers over the others.
For example, in the Harry Potter story, it is true that Harry grew up at 4 Privet Drive. In saying this, I am not claiming that if J. K. Rowling’s story were true, Harry Potter would have grown up at 4 Privet Drive. Rather, I am simply saying that this is true in the story.
Like Brenner (2015, p. 1305, note 21), I am not suggesting that the nihilist should say that what it is for some simples to be arranged dogwise, for example, is determined by composite fiction. Rather, she should say that what it means for the simples to be arranged dogwise is that, according to composite fiction those simples compose a dog. As Brenner points out, this is why the nihilist who gives a fictionalist answer to the SAQ does not run up against a concern Elder raises about the fictionalist response (Elder 2011, pp. 119–120). Elder complains that if the fact that the simples are arranged dogwise is supposed to explain why the folk believe in dogs, it cannot be that the simples are arranged dogwise because the people believe they are. That is true, but the fictionalist account I describe denies the latter claim.
Unger (2014) suggests this difficulty for the nihilist in a note and does not spell out exactly how the argument goes. As Brenner discusses, Unger seems to be suggesting that if F is sorities-susceptible, we should deny that simples are ever arranged Fwise. See Brenner (2015), pp. 1306–1307 for discussion.
See Wiggins (1980) for a defense of the idea that identity is sortal-dependent.
This is not to say that the believer must accept that existence is vague; there are ways for her to deny this. For example, she might endorse epistemicism about vagueness (see Williamson (1994) for a defense of epistemicism). Rather, I’m saying that this presents a problem for the believer where it does not present a problem for the nihilist.
See Brenner (2015, p. 1308 n. 26) for some thoughts on why vague existence is more objectionable than vague predicates.
Dorr and Rosen (2002 p. 170) point out that there is no problem with a vague answer to the SCQ if composition a fiction, whereas it seems the answer cannot be vague if it is intended as a “serious theoretical claim”.
This problem is often referred to as the grounding problem. The problem is discussed by Burke (1992), Olson (2001) and Bennett (2004), among others. Note that the grounding problem does not rely on the (dubious) assumption that all of an object’s qualitative properties supervene on its microstructure. The problem arises not because the statue and lump have the same microphysical structure at time t, but because they are composed of the numerically same parts and so, are also in the same surroundings. See Olson (2001, p. 342) for a discussion of this point.
This is the exact formulation of the statue/lump problem given by McGrath (2005, p. 476). I use his formulation in order to facilitate the presentation of his argument that a composite-free analogue of the puzzle arises for the nihilist.
Although McGrath does not say this explicitly, keep in mind that they have the same parts arranged in the same way and they are in the same context.
McGrath uses “given composites”, but per the discussion in Sect. 3, I think this should be replaced with “according to composite fiction”.
It is important to keep in mind that the simples at t (i.e., s) might not be the exact same simples that exist at t1 (i.e., they may not be the numerically same simples in collection s1). This is because composites need not be composed of the same simples at every point in their existence.
On p. 477 McGrath writes, “The denial that S is factual is tantamount to the denial of P(S). But why think P(S) is false? Here the nihilist can appeal to the same sorts of considerations realists do … Her available answers to the problem are just going to be simple transformations of the realist’s. If she can adequately defend her answer, it is hard to see why the realist cannot give the corresponding answer.”.
McGrath writes, “I will argue that Peter van Inwagen’s well-known project of nihilist paraphrasis, if successful, specifies factual contents for a large class of composites-sentences, including, as we will see, the sentences figuring in the statue/lump puzzle…” (2005, p. 470, my emphasis).
McGrath (2005, p. 469 n. 18) notes that he does not think his argument against the nihilist hinges on his particular way of posing the puzzle He writes, “Nothing hinges on my particular account of what is vexing about the statue/lump puzzle. The reader is free to substitute her favoured account (perhaps one appealing to some intuition of ‘overcrowding’)”.
In puzzles involving apparent spatiotemporal coincidence between composites of distinct kinds, F and G refer to kind terms. But in puzzles involving apparent spatiotemporal coincidence between composites of the same kind, F and G refer to proper names (e.g., Tib and Tibbles). The fact that the nihilist can deny the factuality of No Coincidence also enables the nihilist to dissolve Tib/Tibbles style puzzles, which is the sort of puzzle Nolan discusses when suggesting that some puzzles might rebound on the nihilist. See Nolan (2010).
In Sect. 4 I defined what it means for simples s and s′ to be arranged same-Fwise when s and s′ exist at different times and so, when according to composite fiction, s and s′ compose objects that are diachronically identical. However, we can define the arranged same-Fwise relation more broadly as to include cases where s and s′ exist at the same time and so, according to composite fiction, compose objects that are synchronically identical. This broader definition is needed in the Ship of Theseus case since Ship Transitivity says that if New Planks is diachronically identical to the Ship of Theseus and Old Planks is diachronically identical to the Ship of Theseus, then New Planks and Old Planks are synchronically identical. Here is a broader, disjunctive, definition of arranged same-Fwise: Simples s and s′ are arranged same-Fwise if and only if either, (a) s exists at t and is arranged Fwise, s′ exists at t′ and is arranged Fwise, and s and s′ are spatiotemporally and causally related in some way W, and according to composite fiction, being related in way W suffices for the existence of a persisting f composed of s at the earlier time and s′ at the later time OR (b) s is arranged Fwise at t, s′ is arranged Fwise at t, and according to composite fiction, s composes an object f at t, s′ composes an object f′ at t, and f = f′. Notice that this definition is broad enough to account for Old Planks Wins, despite the fact that the simples arranged Old-Plankswise are arranged same-shipwise with simples arranged Ship-of-Theseuswise via being arranged “pile-of-plankswise” (or something like that) along the way.
McGrath (2005, pp. 479–480) seems to think that the transitivity principle gets left alone when the puzzle is paraphrased. I certainly agree that the nihilist has no reason to deny the transitivity of identity, but the issue is that identity is no longer the relevant relation when we paraphrase the sentences—arranged same-shipwise is.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Torin Alter, Helen Daly, Scott Hestevold, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Kantin, H. Why compositional nihilism dissolves puzzles. Synthese 197, 4319–4340 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01924-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01924-w