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There are still a few more days before the deadline to submit abstracts for a workshop on Scott Soames’ philosophy in Cologne, Germany this May. The conference is aptly titled Meaning, Modality and Apriority, and involves both a Graduate Conference with a keynote from Soames as well as a research workshop with Soames. The call for the graduate conference has passed some time ago, but the deadline for the research workshop is 15th March. There are only four slots though, so I expect that there will be a bit of competition for those. Anyway, since I have commented on Scott Soames’ work before, for instance in my paper ‘On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities’, I thought that I should submit something. I’ve come up with an abstract for a paper in which I plan to show that Soames’ case against the linguistic account of modality supported by people like David Chalmers, Frank Jackson and Alan Sidelle suffers from the fact that his own, supposedly metaphysical story about modal statements, is remarkably close to the one offered by deflationists such as Sidelle. My abstract follows, but please don’t steal it!

The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements
ABSTRACT

In his Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (2005), Scott Soames puts forward an influential critique of the framework of two-dimensional modal semantics and the interpretation of a posteriori necessities proposed by proponents of the framework, especially Frank Jackson (1998) and David Chalmers (1996). While I agree with much of what Soames has to say about the topic, I am concerned that ultimately both Soames and the two-dimensionalists fail to see the fine-grainedness of the metaphysical status of modal statements. This is partly due to the short-comings of Kripke’s (1980) original treatment of a posteriori necessities, and partly due to the contemporary deflationist trend, which takes modality to reduce fully to linguistic or conceptual content. The latter is familiar especially from the work of Jackson and Chalmers, as well as Alan Sidelle (2002).

On the face of it, Soames is clearly opposed to this trend, as he thinks that Kripke’s most important achievement was to break the illusion that the a priori can be identified with the analytic, and that modality is merely linguistic (Soames 2006: 307). Soames claims that any kind of interesting philosophy will not fit into this deflationary, linguistic model. I very much sympathise with this idea, but it seems to me that Soames fails to fully commit to it himself. E. J. Lowe (2007a, 2007b) has raised similar concerns about the shortcomings in Soames’ metaphysical story, but so far Soames has not replied to them in any detail (cf. Soames 2007). The closest that Soames comes to addressing the metaphysical status of modal statements are the last three chapters of his earlier book, Beyond Rigidity (2002, ch. 9-11). We are especially interested in his analysis of the difference between the following identity sentences:

[1] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of a substance molecules of which contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
[2] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of the substance instances of which fall from the sky in rain and fill the lakes and rivers. (Soames 2002: 272.)

Presumably, (1) is metaphysically necessary, while (2) is contingent. Soames takes a point from Nathan Salmon (2005), which I believe to be of crucial importance for this analysis: what makes (1) a metaphysical necessity, if anything, is the underlying assumption concerning chemical substances, namely, that they have their molecular structures essentially (Soames 2002: 273). Now, Soames goes on to ask ‘What exactly are substances, and how do we arrive at our modal intuitions (pretheoretic beliefs) regarding them?’ (ibid.). This is of course where one ought give the metaphysical story, but the story that Soames gives is remarkably close to the one familiar from the deflationists. Soames describes how we introduce a natural kind term such as “water” with the intention that it is a ‘substance term’, i.e. applies to everything that shares the molecular structure in the original sample that we decided to call “water”. However, we do not need to know what that structure is when we introduce the term, all that matters is that we intend to use the notion in a way that respects the original intuition. We may subsequently learn more about the substance in question, e.g. that water is H2O, but this is the point where the metaphysical story about (1) ends (cf. Soames 2002: 273-275).

Soames goes on to refine the account somewhat, but this picture is effectively what he ends up with. Now, it seems that we could sum up Soames’ account roughly as follows: ‘Nothing counts as water in any situation unless it has the same deep explanatory features (if any) as the stuff we call “water”’, which I have quoted from Sidelle (2002: 319). But as Sidelle argues, this is an analytic principle concerning the linguistic usage of the the term “water” rather than a metaphysical a priori truth! The way Soames sometimes puts this is almost exactly as in the passage quoted from Sidelle:

‘”Water” was stipulated to designate whatever underlying physical characteristic it is that is shared by (nearly) all members of the class of paradigmatic water-samples that explains their most salient features – the fact that they boil and freeze at certain temperatures, that they are clear, potable, and necessary to life, etc.’ (Soames Forthcoming: 7).

According to Soames, when this stipulation is combined with our empirical information about water, it follows that water is necessarily H2O. So, it seems that Soames has given us little more than what the deflationary picture offers, and hence we are still at risk of identifying the a priori with the analytic and reducing modality to linguistics. In fact, Soames explicitly opts for a linguistic analysis rather than a metaphysical one, although he claims that this helps us to narrow down ‘the range of feasible ontological alternatives’ (ibid., 1).

In addition to an inquiry into Soames’ account of modal statements, I will offer a more detailed analysis of the metaphysical assumptions associated with modal statements and argue that the metaphysical story is much more fine-grained than Soames suggests. The elements of the metaphysical story are indeed already familiar from Salmon (2005), but there is much more to be said about e.g. the status of chemical substances, and it seems to me that Soames does not do justice to Salmon, who did recognize the complexity of the underlying metaphysical story (p. 176 ff.). Relying on recent work in the philosophy of chemistry (e.g. Hendry 2006, Needham 2008), I will attempt to give a more satisfactory account about the underlying metaphysical assumptions concerning chemical substances. We will see that there are some good reasons to think that the assumption according to which chemical substances have their molecular structures essentially may even be mistaken.

The upshot is that although Soames is on the right lines in challenging the deflationary approach to modal statements, his own account fails to fully accommodate their metaphysical status.

References:

• Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Hendry, R. F. (2006) ‘Elements, Compounds, and Other Chemical Kinds’, Philosophy of Science 73, 864–75.
• Jackson, F. (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Lowe, E. J. (2007a) ‘Does the Descriptivist/Anti-Descriptivist Debate Have Any Philosophical Significance?’, Philosophical Books 48, 27-33.
• Lowe, E. J. (2007b) ‘A Problem for A Posteriori Essentialism Concerning Natural Kinds’, Analysis 67.4, 286-92.
• Needham, P. (2008) ‘Resisting Chemical Atomism: Duhem’s Argument’, Philosophy of Science 75, 921–31.
• Salmon, N. U. (2005) Reference and Essence, 2nd ed. (New York: Prometheus Books).
• Sidelle, A. (2002) ‘On the Metaphysical Contingency of Laws of Nature’, in Conceivability and Possibility, ed. T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 309-336.
• Soames, S. (2002) Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Soames, S. (2005) Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Soames, S. (2006) ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary Aposteriori’, Philosophical Issues 16: Philosophy of Language.
• Soames, S. (2007) ‘The Substance and Significance of the Dispute Over Two-Dimensionalism’, Philosophical Books 48: 34–49.
• Soames, S. (Forthcoming) ‘What are Natural Kinds?’, Philosophical Topics.

Amazing luck in terms of weather for hill walking doesn’t seem to end, as last Saturday’s trip to Coniston with the University hill walking society was once again a very nice day. Did about 22k with 1400m height again, covering most of the interesing peaks in the area. I’ve been to Coniston a couple of times before, but until now I hadn’t posted any photos from there. There’s now a bunch of photos from Coniston in my Gallery. There’s only one walk left this term, which will be to Whitby. However, I have a road trip planned during the Easter break with a couple of mates; we will be driving around Cornwall and Devon for a few days. Hopefully I’ll get some nice shots from that trip! Here’s a teaser from Coniston:

Coniston

Firstly, if you haven’t seen my previous post, go there now and leave a comment. I’m hoping to get some feedback about what people would like to see on this blog. In the meanwhile, here is another post in the ‘Work in Progress’ series. This time a survey article of sorts based on the lectures that I gave in Geneva last December, entitled ‘Varieties of Modality’. I was hoping to get this published somewhere like Philosophy Compass, but it seems that I entered the party a bit too late, as they are not intending to commission any more modality stuff at this time. It may be difficult to find a home for this, as it is really a survey article, although I do entertain some rather wild ideas towards the end of the paper…

The question that I pursue in the paper is how many different kinds of modality – different realms of possible worlds – are there? Philosophers commonly talk at least about metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, logical, physical, mathematical, biological, technological, normative and natural modality. It is not always clear how these different types of modality are related, or whether some of them are more fundamental than others. The relationships between metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity and possibility are particularly interesting. The paper is a survey of our options in this regard. We can distinguish four approaches which are currently widely discussed: the Kripkean approach, the conservative approach, the conceptualist approach, and the essentialist approach. The differences between these approaches are best described by comparing their takes on the distinction between metaphysical and conceptual modality. The Kripkean approach holds that this distinction is genuine and that we are dealing with two different kinds of modality. The conservative approach, which is familiar for instance from Bob Hale’s work, challenges the role of metaphysical modality and suggests that logical necessity is the most fundamental type of modality, it is absolute. The conceptualist approach, most forcefully argued for by Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, also questions the distinction and suggests that metaphysical modality can be fully accounted for in terms of conceptual modality. Finally, the essentialist approach, defended especially by Kit Fine, suggests that conceptual and logical modality can be seen as species of metaphysical modality. I will also consider an alternative approach based on the essentialist approach, which takes metaphysical modality to be absolute in Hale’s sense.

You can download the paper for the survey bits, but what’s this crazy alternative approach..? Well, if we take the cue from the essentialist approach and consider logical and conceptual necessity as subspecies of metaphysical necessity, as Kit Fine suggests in his ‘Varieties of Necessity’ (2002), then I think we already have the tools for something a bit more radical. Firstly, we can rule out all extra-metaphysical possibilities — that is, possibilities such as water being XYZ, when we consider water to be essentially H20 — as pseudo-possibilities. What this means in practice is that there is no stronger type of necessity than metaphysical necessity; in fact, metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity would all seem to be equally strong. But I think that we can go even further, and indeed that we must go further if we wish to maintain that conceptual and logical necessity are useful notions at all: otherwise it seems that we might just as well talk only about metaphysical modality. But if we reserve the notion of metaphysical modality to those modal truths which are not true in virtue of either the definitions of concepts or the laws of logic, and similarly for conceptual and logical modality, we get a rather surprising picture about the relationships between different kinds of possibility:

Metaphysical, Logical, Conceptual, and Physical Possibility

What makes this interesting is that, according to the line suggested above, the picture for necessity is exactly the same. This is obviously a rather strange and seemingly contradictory result, but there may be a way to accommodate it. The idea is that only metaphysical modality is fundamental, but there is still use for the notions of conceptual and logical modality exactly in the same sense as there is use for the notions of physical or biological modality. So, according to this picture, different subspecies of metaphysical modality should be considered as concerning the natures of specific subsets of the set of all things. Hence, conceptual modality concerns things that are possible or necessary in virtue of the natures of concepts, and only them. Specifically, although it would commonly be considered that something like ‘It is possible to travel faster than light’ is conceptually possible, according to this picture this is not strictly correct: the possibility of travelling faster than light is not ruled out by the natures of concepts, but nor do the natures of concepts make it possible to travel faster than light. For something to qualify as a conceptual possibility, it has to be made possible by the nature of concepts in this positive sense. A similar analysis applies to logical possibility.

Well, this doesn’t really do justice to the idea, and I’m not quite sure that it even works, but the survey of other approaches that precedes this alternative picture in the paper might motivate the approach somewhat. There’s also a lot more to say about the status of logical modality here and I do go into it in some detail in the paper. If the idea is at all feasible, it would seem to require revamping modal logic as well — that’s something that I will not attempt.

As it says in the title, this February was the busiest month of the website/blog to date, with 747 unique visitors, 2876 visits, and just over 30k hits. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that I’ve been updating the blog a bit more frequently. The site is now almost a year old, and this could mean that it’s time for some changes, but the format seems to work and I’m too lazy to revamp the graphics right now.

The one thing that is still missing is feedback: the blog doesn’t get many comments. These posts are also direcly imported to my account on Facebook, and there I do get some comments and discussion, but it would be nice to see some here as well, as the audience on Facebook is limited to my friends. Feedback would also help me to determine how much of the traffic here is actually from legit/returning visitors.

So, if you are a frequent visitor to my blog, the least you could do is to tell me what you would like to see here so that I can make the website and blog more interesting to any visitors that I may have. So far the blog has been dominated by philosophy posts, and specifically posts about papers that I’m working on, but I would quite like to extend on that a bit. Here are some suggestions for content, tell me what you’d like to see:

-Philosophy ‘work in progress’ posts of the sort that I have been doing a lot.
-General philosophy posts about random subjects.
-Philosophy news, CFPs, issues in profession, funding, teaching, and so on.
-Updates to my Gallery, selected shots from albums.
-More photos?
-General photography posts such as photography tips and news about new gear etc.
-IT/Technology news and commentary.
-Reviews of gadgets etc. There will be one post in this category coming up very soon…
-Something else?

Oh, and if I don’t get any comments on this post, I’ll just assume that my audience consists of spam robots…

I’ve been to good hill walking trips again, a nice and fairly sunny walk to Ambleside in the Lake District, doing Helvellyn and Fairfield among others, and a weekend away in Snowdonia National Park in Wales. Click the links to check out the photos in my gallery. The first half of the Snowdonia photos are from a previous trip there a couple of years ago. This time we had very different weather with huge amounts of snow — up to our waists at best! Managed to climb Tryfan on the second day despite the snow, which was really the one peak I wanted to do, as I had already done Snowdon on the previous trip. Next up in a couple of weeks will be a walk in the Lakes again, Coniston to be precise. Here a couple of teaser shots from the Gallery, one from each trip:

Ambleside

Snowdonia

I’ve just revised my paper on Euclidean Geometry and the A Priori. According to my statistics, the previous version has been downloaded a good few times, so apparently there is some interest regarding this topic. It might still require some further work, but my argument should be easier to follow now — the paper previously suffered from a lack of a clear target. My target is effectively contemporary views on a priori justification, such as the ones familiar from Albert Casullo and perhaps Laurence BonJour. I don’t tackle their views in any detail, but rather argue generally against the idea that a priori justification and knowledge are empirically defeasible, that is, the idea that further empirical evidence could defeat a priori justification. The single most influential problem for the opposing view, namely that such empirical defeaters are not possible, is the case of Euclidean geometry. A fairly commonly accepted view at the moment is that Euclidean geometry was indeed justified a priori, but once it turned out that the actual geometry is Riemannian rather than Euclidean, the original justification was defeated by empirical evidence. My argument can be outlined as follows:

1. A priori justification (and knowledge) is empirically indefeasible.
2. Cases like Euclidean geometry appear to suggest that this is not the case, hence the commonly accepted conception of a priori justification takes it to be empirically defeasible.
3. I want to keep (1), so (2) needs to be addressed somehow.
4. To do this, we must distinguish between the apriority of a proposition and the truth of a proposition.
5. Even though the judgements that we make concerning the truth of a proposition are empirically defeasible, a priori justification is not.
6. A priori justification concerns the metaphysical possibility of the proposition.

In motivating my case, I use some material which I developed in my draft ‘The Notion of Logical Truth’; mainly in the form of an analogy between the distinction of pure/applied geometry and truth in a model/truth in the world. Anyway, see the actual paper for the details of the argument. The ideas that I develop here go back to my very first published journal article, ‘A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis’, where I used Euclidean geometry as an example. This time I’ve actually looked at the details of Euclidean geometry to back up my case.

I’ve uploaded new photos to my Gallery from two recent hikes, they are from Osmotherley, North York moors, and Braithwaite, Lake District. I’ve also changed the organisation of the Gallery a bit.

I’ve been to Braithwaite before and there are a couple of old photos in that album as well. We had great weather for both hikes and especially in Braithwaite that amounted to some nice photography too. I haven’t been shooting quite as much recently, but regular hill walks are a good place to do it, as long as the weather is decent. I’m heading to the Lakes again this Saturday, to Ambleside, and the weekend after that I’ll join the Durham Uni hill walking society for a weekend away in Snowdonia National Park in Wales, where I’ve been once before.

Here are two shots from the recent walks, one from each, see the rest in the albums.

So far I haven’t really used this blog to publicize conferences or events, as I figured that most people who are interested follow the major blogs and mailing lists that list these events anyway. However, I figured that I might as well do it when I come across something interesting and worth publicizing. I believe that this conference might be such a case: Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. June 30 – July 3 2010, Prague, Strahov Monastery (Czech Republic). Prague is a lovely city, and a great place to have a conference.

The primary reason why I chose to publicize this event is my forthcoming volume on Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. The idea is of course that this is the perfect event to publicize my book. In fact, two of the contributors, E. J. Lowe and David Oderberg, are among the keynote speakers. Michal Loux has also been invited, and I should’ve really asked him to contribute to my volume as well. Unfortunately I already had too many people when that occurred to me.

Here is the actual CFP:

Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology (we may notice various applications of contemporary formal logical techniques) and in the range of proposed solutions to particular problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the conference Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The conference aims to bring together leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns. The specific focus of the conference is a re-examination of Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics in contemporary setting. It is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University under the auspices of the Czech Academy Foundation. It takes place in the historical parts of the Strahov monastery near the Prague castle from June 30 to July 2, 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS

* Papers are welcome on any of the topics indicated below.
* A short abstract of cca. 2500-3500 characters should be submitted to the Organizing Committee by April 15, 2010, by e-mail (if possible – see contacts above). The Peer-Review Board will select the papers to be presented at the Conference.
* Papers should be written in the English (preferred) or German language.
* The length of a paper should not exceed 25 minutes of reading time.

Papers selected by the Peer-Review Board will be edited and published as a supplement volume of the journal Studia Neoaristotelica.

TOPICS

* being and existence
* realisms vs. antirealisms
* truth, truthmaking, predication
* particulars and universals
* hylemorphism vs. mechanicism
* persistence through time
* the necessary and the possible
* the actual and the potential (powers, dispositions)
* propositions and states of affaires
* causes and explanation
* God

I do have one reservation about this conference: it is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University, and the peer review borad as well seems to consist of people working in theology departments. The suggested topics are clearly good though, and the keynote speakers are excellent, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of doubt. Anyway, I’ll probably submit something, if for no other reason then because it will be a great chance to let people know that there is a volume dedicated to this type of metaphysics coming out.

I have once again revised one of my papers which has been looking for a home for quite some time. It’s called ‘Truthmaking and Realism’, and it’s getting longer and longer: now at 11k words. The motivation comes from recent literature concerning truthmaking, especially the OUP book Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd (2005). Several authors in the volume suggest that truthmaking is not compatible just with realism, but also with pragmatism and idealism, and thus does not help in defending realism in general. I take this point and suggest that in fact the wider applicability of the truthmaker principle only strengthens the realist’s case, for all that is needed is a plausible way to account for our realist intuitions concerning truth.

To defend this conclusion, I take one of the most influential critiques of realism, which has been advocated by Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, and Nelson Goodman; they all share some basic assumptions about realism and its problems. The objection is essentially that realism cannot account for truth. There is an important background assumption here, which is that realism is committed to the correspondence theory of truth. Putnam’s famous model-theoretic argument challenges the correspondence theory by claiming that there will be infinitely many correspondence relations between words and things, and hence indeterminacy ensues as we cannot pick out the intended correspondence. Michael Devitt, in his Realism and Truth (1997), has forcefully argued against the connection between realism and truth, and I take his point, but my argument goes roughly as follows:

1. Let us assume that the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection against realism combined with the correspondence theory holds.
2. This does not mean that realism automatically fails, because it is independent of the correspondence theory, as Michael Devitt has argued.
3. We still need an account of truth which is compatible with realism and does not succumb to the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.
4. Truthmaking is such an account of truth, as it is compatible across ontologies, including realism.
5. The combination of realism and truthmaking can stand against the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.

The part that I have revised mostly concerns the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique. I’ve added several passages that support my analysis. I still have some reservations about Dummett’s role in all this, because I found passages which suggest that he doesn’t consider realism to be committed to the correspondence theory, such as the following:

The correspondence theory of truth is often claimed as essential to realism. This is evidently false, since Frege was undoubtedly a realist but rejected the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory is also often confused with a truth-conditional meaning-theory, which is the natural extension of the classical two-valued semantic theory that we have taken as characteristic of realism. A properly constructed meaning-theory rightly seeks to characterise the concepts of truth and meaning simultaneously, whereas the correspondence theory took meaning as already given. It is an analogous mistake to regard the principle that, if a statement is true, there must be something in virtue of which it is true, is peculiar to realism. On the contrary, it is a regulative principle which all must accept. (Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, 1991: 331).

Still, Dummett here endorses a ‘regulative principle’, which bares remarkable similarity to the truthmaker principle, and this is really all I need for my argument: if the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique does not undermine truthmaking, and we have some independent reasons to think that truthmaking is a good starting point for a theory of truth, then the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique loses its strength.

I will not go into the details of truthmaking here, and in fact I don’t go very deeply into them in the paper either, but my preferred formulation of the truthmaker principle is as follows:

(TM*) Necessarily, in all possible worlds where [p] is true, there exists something alpha that makes [p] true.

The angled brackets indicate a proposition. The idea is that this principle is compatible across ontologies, but still manages to capture the core idea and plausibility of truthmaking. See the paper for details, any comments are welcome.

I was pleased to hear recently that a volume edited by my friend Philip Goff, who is currently at the University of Hertfordshire, has been accepted for publication by Palgrave-Macmillan. The volume is called ‘Spinoza on Monism’ and it combines historical work on Spinoza with contemporary work on monism. What makes me especially happy about it is that myself and a colleague of mine from Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill (who has his viva today!) are also contributing a joint paper to the volume. Our contribution is entitled ‘Priority Monism and Conceptual Pluralism’, and is effectively a reply to Jonathan Schaffer’s (who is also contributing) paper, ‘Monism: the Priority of the Whole’. Other contributors include Terry Horgan and Galen Strawson.

We look at Schaffer’s reply to the so called ‘commonsense argument’ against monism due to Russell, who claimed that pluralism is favoured by commonsense. Schaffer argues that Russell’s case against monism is based on a misinterpretation: (priority) monism does not suggest that only one thing exists, but rather that only one thing is fundamental. Schaffer asks us to think of a heap; the grains of sand in the heap would seem to be prior to the whole, the heap. But a heap is not an integrated whole, rather, it is a mere aggregate. So, even if commonsense suggests that in the case of the heap the parts are prior to the whole, there may be other cases where the whole is prior to the parts, such as a circle and its semicircles—here commonsense would seem to suggest that the circle must be prior. Accordingly, Schaffer (p. 12) turns the commonsense argument to its head:

1. According to commonsense, integrated wholes are prior to their arbitrary portions.
2. According to commonsense, the cosmos is an integrated whole.
3. According to commonsense, the many proper parts are arbitrary portions of the cosmos.
4. According to commonsense, the cosmos is prior to its many proper parts.

We wish to challenge premise 3. Schaffer defends this premise as follows: ‘Commonsense appreciates that there are many ways to carve the world. Consider all the ways that one may slice a pie, or all the ways of drawing lines on a map. There seems no objective ground for carving things in just one way’ (p. 12). This line of thought bears some similarity to what Putnam and Dummett have suggested, i.e. the idea of conceptual relativity/pluralism and the view of reality as an amorphous lump, respectively. We suspect that there is something wrong with line of thought. The position Putnam and Dummett reject is roughly that there is a complete scheme (CS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is independent of all and any parochial interests, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is a portion so carved. No scheme can possibly meet both (i) and (ii) – in particular, there are many objects which exist but whose specifications are dependent on our parochial interests (e.g. interest rates, moral patients, nonrepresentational artwork, music).

This much is correct in the line of thought at hand, but even if we cannot have a complete scheme, we might be able to have something very much like it, call it a near-complete scheme (NCS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is non-parochial, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is either a portion so carved, or is ontologically dependent on some such portion or combination of portions. An NCS keeps the first part of the CS, but sacrifices the second, while nonetheless holding to an important asymmetry between the objects it picks out and the objects which other, parochial schemes pick out – it captures the sense we have that interest rates, music, moral patients and so on all depend for their existence on the existence of things which are not themselves interest rates, music or moral patients, and in many cases do not require the existence of interest rates etc. in order for themselves to exist.

We will offer two arguments in favour of a NCS: an ontological and a semantic one. The ontological argument suggests that there are dependency relations such that if certain macro-physical phenomena exist, such as nonrepresentational artworks, or indeed any such macro-physical objects, then there must be some underlying physical order – non-arbitrary micro-physical phenomena – which is necessary for the existence of those macro-physical objects. The semantic argument suggests that you can slice the pie in as many different ways as you like, but in order to be aware that what you are doing is slicing a pie which can be sliced in many other ways, your conception of the pie cannot be just ‘what I have when I put these slices together’ – precisely because you can slice the pie in many other ways, this description, while correct, isn’t sufficient – it fails to capture the independence of the pie from any particular way of slicing it.

The upshot of this paper is a clear challenge for Schaffer’s defence of priority monism against the commonsense argument. If we are right, it seems that the commonsense argument can stand its ground.

That’s effectively the abstract of the paper, but we still have to write it!