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How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist

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I simply want to strongly emphasize that nihilists never just say, ‘there are no toasters; revise your breakfast plans’ (Bennett 2009).

Abstract

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies.

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Notes

  1. Note the qualification ‘seem to’ in my characterization. “Compatibilists” such as van Inwagen (2014: p. 10) insist that the tension between their views and common sense is merely apparent and consequently reject the label ‘revisionary’. These metaphysicians still count as revisionary in my sense. See below for more on compatibilist and incompatibilist strategies.

  2. See Lewis (1986), Sider (2001), and further works to be cited in the footnotes of Sect. 3.

  3. See Rosen and Dorr (2002) for Nihilism and van Inwagen (1990) for Organicism. To simplify things, in what follows I will pretend that “liberal eliminativists”, who believe in a large number of objects that nonetheless lack the right modal profile to qualify as ordinary (Unger 1979; Heller 1990), believe in ordinary objects.

  4. See Hirsch (2002: p. 116); the label comes from Korman (2009).

  5. For example, in their studies the folk appear to intuit that two people shaking hands, two mice glued together, or some rocks randomly scattered over one’s yard, don’t compose anything (unless they serve a purpose). Rose and Schaffer conclude that the folk’s beliefs about composition are heavily influenced by teleological thinking, but we don’t need to take a stance about whether they are right about that (see Korman and Carmichael 2017 for some criticisms). It’s enough to observe that when prompted to say whether composition occurs, the folk will often say ‘No’.

  6. See Sects. 4 and 5, van Inwagen (1990: p. 103), and Korman (2009, 2014, 2016: Ch. 7).

  7. See Hirsch (2002, 2005).

  8. Cf. McGrath (2008).

  9. The expression ‘compatibilism’ was first introduced into the debate by O’Leary-Hawthorne and Michael (1996). See Chisholm (1976: Ch. 3), Heller (1990: p. 14) and Thomasson (2007: pp. 183–185) for loose talk, Lewis (1986: p. 213) for implicit quantifier domain restriction, van Inwagen (1990: Chs. 10–11) for context-sensitivity, Liggins (2008) for syntactically singular but semantically plural expressions, Horgan and Potrč (2008: Chs. 4–5) for context-relativized propositions, and Sattig (2015) for systematic ambiguity between material and formal predication. Cameron (2008) and Schaffer (2009: pp. 356–362) attempt to recast debates seemingly about what exists as debates about what is fundamental; Sider (2013), Dorr (2005: pp. 248–250), and Cameron (2010) suggest that we understand them as concerning what exists in the most joint-carving sense of ‘exists’.

  10. Merricks (2001: Ch. 7) is an example of the former strategy, while Rosen and Dorr (2002) and Eklund (2005) are examples of the latter.

  11. O’Leary-Hawthorne and Michael (1996), Merricks (2001: pp. 163–170), Hirsch (2002: pp. 109–111), Korman (2008, 2009). See Keller (2015), though, for a contrasting view.

  12. Korman (2009).

  13. Korman (2009: p. 248, 2015, 2016: Ch. 6).

  14. Eklund (2002: p. 250), McGrath (2005), Bennett (2009: pp. 66–71).

  15. Uzquiano (2004).

  16. See Osborne (2016) for a more thorough discussion of the relevant empirical literature.

  17. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.

  18. Lewis (1986: p. 211) and van Cleve (1986: pp. 144–146) mention the same folk criteria—apparent spatial continuity, easy distinguishability from the background, and joint movement—of composition. Similar criteria have been proposed in cognitive psychology (Spelke 1990) and cognitive science (Taraborelli 2002: p. 1). See especially Spelke’s four principles of object recognition: the principles of cohesion, boundedness, rigidity, and no action at a distance (1990: p. 49). For a general survey of the “binding problem(s)”, see Roskies (1999).

  19. See Alvarez (2011) on the phenomenon of ensemble representation, one kind of which is the representation of several objects as one. Generally, ensemble representations compress data and thereby achieve cognitive economy at the cost of some loss of information.

  20. Cf. Singh and Hoffman (2013: pp. 181–182).

  21. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

  22. See Korman (forthcoming) and Eklund (2017) for a similar objection to analytic deflationism; see also deRosset (2015) for further relevant discussion.

  23. For debunking arguments in ethics, see Harman (1977: Ch. 1), Joyce (2006), Street (2006) and Clarke-Doane (2012; in mathematics), Benacerraf (1973), Field (1989: pp. 25–30) and Clarke-Doane (2012; in logic), Schechter (2010); and in material-object metaphysics, Korman (2014, 2016: Ch. 7) and Benovsky (2015).

  24. For domain-neutral objections to debunking arguments in general, see Williamson (2007: pp. 220–241), White (2010), and Vavova (2014).

  25. The problem was first raised in Cohen and Lehrer (1983).

  26. Cf. Wedgwood (2002). Conee and Feldman (2004) defend mentalism about propositional justification. In what follows, I will use the word ‘justification’ for doxastic justification and ‘mentalism’ for the doxastic thesis.

  27. My view is shared by Nolan (2005: p. 36), Cameron (2007), Miller (2009) and Parsons (2013).

  28. This isn’t uncontroversial. Williamson (2018), for instance, argues that allowing counterpossibles with non-trivial truth-values would come at too steep a price because (among other things) it would block counterfactual reductio ad absurdum proofs in mathematics. But there are ways of understanding metaphysical necessity that avoid Williamson’s objection. For example, one might think of metaphysical necessity as a restricted notion of necessity and at the same time adopt a stronger (perhaps absolute) notion of necessity that does preserve the triviality of counterpossibles (see Clarke-Doane 2017). At any rate, it would be dogmatic to the extreme to insist that we have no way of making sense of the three scenarios depicted in (i)–(iii).

  29. See Pryor’s (2000) and dogmatism and Huemer’s (2001) phenomenal conservativism.

  30. By ‘rich content’, philosophers usually mean something stronger: content as of objects belonging to certain kinds (Siegel 2010: Chs. 4–5 and Masrour 2011). I don’t want to enter a terminological dispute here. Suffice it to say that on some views we have perceptual experiences as of composite objects, while on others we don’t.

  31. See McGrath (2018) for this kind of view. For the coarse-grained view, see Bonjour (2003: p. 79). Silins (2013: p. 16 n4) argues that even if perceptual experience has no content (as according to Travis 2004), it could still immediately justify our beliefs.

  32. See Fumerton (1995), Bonjour (2003), and Wright (2004). Some sort of inferential story looks like the most plausible account of ordinary beliefs about which objects don’t exist. One such story would go roughly as follows. Ordinary people have perceptual experiences as of ordinary objects, but they never perceive any non-occluded region of space as containing an extraordinary object. So (when the question arises), they infer that these regions don’t contain extraordinary objects. Inferential beliefs of this sort are arguably justified by mentalist standards.

  33. Goldman (1986).

  34. Littlejohn (2009).

  35. Bach (1985) and Engel (1992).

  36. Goldman (1988).

  37. Williamson (2000: p. 257).

  38. See Cohen and Comesaña (forthcoming) for the analogous worry about ameliorative treatments of the NEDP and Littlejohn forthcoming for a response.

  39. Korman doesn’t believe that the argument is sound but argues that rebutting it requires radical measures: we would need to embrace anti-realism, theism, or a special faculty of apprehension (he goes for the last option).

  40. Korman uses the expressions ‘object belief’ and ‘object fact’. Unlike my ‘ontological belief’ and ‘ontological truth’, these only refer to beliefs and facts about which objects do exist.

  41. The argument was first proposed by Lewis (1986: pp. 211–212) and then refined and generalized by Sider (2001: pp. 120–139).

  42. Cf. Rea (1998) and Hawley (2001: pp. 6–7). This is only one possible formulation of the argument; I will defend a different one in Sect. 5. Korman presents the argument as a general line for plenitudinous ontologies, but here I’m concerned only with Universalism.

  43. Korman (2014: p. 10 n29, 2016: p. 104 n22) expresses some doubts about this but concedes that a similar argument by Merricks might survive debunking (2016: pp. 96–97 n11).

  44. See Eklund 2002: pp. 249–252.

  45. Although this version of the Argument from Arbitrariness is less well known than the one I considered in Sect. 3 it has been endorsed by Hudson (2001: p. 108) and Moyer (2006: p. 408), among others.

  46. See Williams (2006) and Sider (2013) against G1, and Cameron (2007) and Miller (2009) against G3.

  47. The argument is reminiscent of one given by Barnett (2010), though importantly, he sets out to explain why pairs of people cannot be conscious, proposes that it’s because they aren’t simple, and concludes that we are simple too. I find this argument much less convincing than the analogous argument for the claim that thoughts require a thinker.

  48. Cf. Merricks (2001: Ch. 7), Rosen and Dorr (2002).

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Acknowledgements

For many helpful comments on and discussions about this paper and its topic I’m especially indebted to Dan Korman and Ted Sider. Many thanks also to Jonathan Barker, Karen Bennett, Pat Bondy, Matti Eklund, Andrew Higgins, Mark Moyer, Steve Petersen, Nico Silins, Lu Teng, anonymous referees, and audiences at the 2015 CEU “Ontology and Metaontology” summer school, the department workshop at Cornell University, the 1st Epistemology of Metaphysics Workshop at the University of Helsinki, a conference titled “False but useful Beliefs” at the Regent’s University, London, the 2017 Eastern APA in Baltimore, and department colloquia at Bilkent University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Haifa.

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    David Mark Kovacs

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Kovacs, D.M. How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist. Synthese 198, 2129–2152 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02196-8

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