Current Controversies in Metaphysics

Elizabeth Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367868093
• eBook ISBN: 9781135007706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book showcases a range of views on topics at the forefront of current controversies in the field of metaphysics. It will give readers a varied and alive introduction to the field, and cover such key issues as: modality, fundamentality, composition, the object/property distinction, and indeterminacy. The contributors include some of the most important philosophers currently writing on these issues. The questions and philosophers are:

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• Are there any individuals at the fundamental level? / (1) Shamik Dasgupta (2) Jason Turner

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• Is there an objective difference between essential and accidental properties? / (1) Meghan Sullivan (2) Kris McDaniel and Steve Steward

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• Are there any worldly states of affairs? / (1) Daniel Nolan (2) Joseph Melia

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• Are there any intermediate states of affairs? / (1) Jessica Wilson (2) Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron

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• Do ordinary objects exist? / (1) Trenton Merricks (2) Helen Beebee

Editor Elizabeth Barnes guides readers through these controversies (all published here for the first time), with a synthetic introduction and succinct abstracts of each debate.

Part I

Are There Any Individuals at the Fundamental Level?

Chapter 1

Can We Do Without Fundamental Individuals? Yes

Shamik Dasgupta

‘Is the world … constituted by purely qualitative facts?’ So asked Adams (1979: 5). He was inclined to think not, and many share his view.¹ In contrast, I am inclined to think that it is. Here I explain why I think this (section 2), explore what kinds of qualitative facts constitute the world (section 3), discuss how other facts emerge from this qualitative basis (section 4), and outline applications of this view in the philosophy of physics (section 5).

1. Qualitativism versus Individualism

The issue is whether ‘the world’ is ‘constituted by purely qualitative facts’. By ‘the world’, let us restrict ourselves to material reality, putting aside numbers and spirits and other intangibles. So the issue is whether it is constituted by purely qualitative facts. But what is a qualitative fact? And what does it mean for the world to be constituted by such things?

Start with qualitative facts. In contrast to individualistic facts, which concern particular individuals, qualitative facts make no mention of any particular individual. A little more precisely, a fact is individualistic iff whether it obtains depends on how things stand with a particular individual (or individuals), and qualitative otherwise.² By ‘individuals’ I mean what in ordinary English we call ‘things’—e.g. apples, alligators, atoms, and so on.

We express individualistic facts with directly referring expressions, e.g.:

• That (pointing at a particular apple) is juicy.
• Obama is the president.

And in first-order logic, we regiment our talk of individualistic facts with constants, e.g.:

• Fa
• Rab
• a≠b

In contrast, examples of qualitative facts include:

• Someone is the president,
• Orange is more similar to red than to blue, and
• Redness and roundness are co-instantiated

since whether these obtain does not depend on how things stand with any particular individual. Perhaps the first depends on there being someone individual or other who is the president, but it is qualitative because it does not depend on any particular person being the president. Likewise with the third.³

We can express some qualitative facts with quantifiers, e.g.:

(∃x)Fx
(∃x)(Px & (∀y)(Py ⊃ x = y))

so long as the predicates F and P are understood to express qualitative properties. And what is a qualitative property? Roughly, one that does not concern any particular individual. The property of being juicy is qualitative. In contrast, the property of being Kripke, and the property of being Obama’s sister, are both non-qualitative.

This is not to say that all qualitative facts are expressed with quantifiers. We will encounter other kinds of qualitative facts in due course. Indeed, some think that the example above concerning orange is one.

Adams’s question was whether the world is constituted by qualitative facts. What does this mean? An affirmative answer presumably yields the following picture: that at rock bottom there are purely qualitative facts, and the individualistic facts are somehow ‘fixed’ or ‘determined’ by, and are ‘nothing over and above’, that qualitative basis. As the metaphor goes, all God had to do when making the world is fix the qualitative facts, and then Her work was done.

But how should these metaphors and pictures be understood? There are a number of approaches, but the one I use here focuses on whether individualistic facts hold in virtue of qualitative facts.⁴

The notion of one fact’s holding in virtue of others sometimes goes by the name of ‘ground’. To say that X holds in virtue of Y (or is ‘grounded in’ Y) is to say that Y explains X, in a particular sense of the word ‘explains’. To illustrate, imagine going to a cricket match and asking why there is a cricket match occurring. A causal answer might describe a sequence of events that led up to the match: two teams agreed to play, arrangements were made, etc. But another answer explains what it is about the event that makes it count as a cricket match in the first place. Presumably the answer is that it is a cricket match in virtue of what various people are doing, e.g. throwing and hitting a ball in accordance with various laws, and so on. Explanations of this second sort are called ‘grounding’ or ‘in virtue of’ or ‘constitutive’ explanations. This is only the briefest of illustrations; for more clarification of the notion, see Fine (2001, 2012), Rosen (2010), Schaffer (2009), and Trogdon (2013b).

So I interpret Adams’s question to be one of grounds, of whether individualistic facts are grounded in qualitative ones. Let qualitativism be the view that they are. And let individualism be the view that the order of explanation goes the other way: that qualitative facts are grounded in individualistic ones.⁵

Thus, according to individualism, the fundamental facts of the world are facts about how various individuals are propertied and related. Perhaps they include the fact that a particular individual A is red and round. No doubt a variety of qualitative facts also obtain in this situation, e.g. that something is red and round, and perhaps that redness and roundness are co-instantiated. But the individualist says that they hold in virtue of the individualistic fact. In contrast, the qualitativist says that the fundamental facts about the situation are various qualitative facts, and they explain why the individual A is both red and round. On this view, the fundamental facts themselves make no mention of the individual A.

It is important not to confuse qualitativism with anti-haecceitism, the modal thesis that there can be no individualistic differences between possible worlds without a qualitative difference.⁶ To be sure, qualitativism does imply anti-haecceitism, and does so thanks to the general principle that grounds necessitate what they ground. More precisely, this principle (which I assume here) is:

• Necessitation: If some facts, the Xs, ground Y, then necessarily if the Xs obtain then Y obtains too.⁷

But the reverse is not the case: anti-haecceitism does not imply qualitativism. If you are an anti-haecceitist this might be because you are a qualitativist, but it might instead be because you are an individualist with independent views about the workings of de re modality (such as counterpart theory) that imply anti-haecceitism—Lewis (1986) was arguably an anti-haecceitist of this latter type. Or it might even be because you are an individualist who also holds the Spinozistic view that all truths are necessary, so that anti-haecceitism is trivially true!

2. Why Qualitativism?

Individualism is (at least initially) a seductive view: it is natural to think that the most fundamental facts of the world concern how a variety of individuals are propertied and related. But I favour qualitativism. Why?

Some argue that qualitativism is the simpler and more parsimonious view. Thus, Paul (2012) says that her own version of qualitativism allows us to ‘characterize the structure of reality while maximizing ontological parsimony’ (p. 241, my emphasis). There may be merits to parsimony, but I will not lean on this consideration here.

Instead, I reject individualism because if there were individualistic facts with no qualitative grounds, the individuals they involve—call them ‘primitive individuals’—would be undetectable and physically redundant. What does this mean? Let me outline the rough idea here (though see Dasgupta [2009] for more details).

Starting with the charge of undetectability, the idea is that a primitive individual is ‘hidden’ behind its qualities. We can detect those qualities and come to know that something or other has them, but according to individualism there is a further fact of the matter as to which individual it is, and I claim that this further fact is epistemically inaccessible. After all, if two situations were qualitative duplicates—that is, if they contained the same number of primitive individuals propertied and related in exactly the same way, so that they differed only in which primitive individuals lie behind the qualities—you would never tell them apart. This idea that primitive individuals are ‘hidden’ extends at least back to Locke—who described them as ‘unknown support of those qualities’—and through Russell—who called them an ‘unknown something’ and said that they ‘cannot be defined or recognized or known’.⁸

What about the charge of physical redundancy? Well, imagine a closed physical system composed of primitive individuals propertied and related in various ways. How it behaves over time depends only on qualitative facts about it, not on those further facts about which primitive individuals lie behind those properties and relations. To see this, note that a different closed system that starts off as a qualitative duplicate—i.e. differing only in which primitive individuals it contains—would behave identically. So the particular primitive individuals that populate the system make no difference to how it evolves. As it might be put, the physics is ‘blind’ to the primitive individuals themselves and ‘cares’ only about the qualitative facts about the system.

The reasoning here is designed to emulate reasoning from physics, in which it is commonplace to reject undetectable and redundant structure. The paradigm example of such reasoning concerns velocity. Start by distinguishing absolute from relative velocity: your relative velocity is your velocity relative to another material body—e.g. 30 mph relative to the road—while your absolute velocity (if there is such a thing) is how fast you are ‘really’ going, independent of any material reference point.

It is orthodoxy amongst physicists and philosophers of physics to think that there is no such th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Are There Any Individuals at the Fundamental Level?
• Part II Is There an Objective Difference between Essential and Accidental Properties?
• Part III Are There Any Worldly States of Affairs?
• Part IV Are There Any Indeterminate States of Affairs?
• Part V Do Ordinary Objects Exist?
• Index