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!