How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance (...) as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffablestuff—then the suggestion that the self (or indeed anything) is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarilycall‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in theCategories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject. (shrink)

It has frequently been suggested that quantum mechanics may provide a genuine case of ontic vagueness or metaphysical indeterminacy. However, discussions of quantum theory in the vagueness literature are often cursory and, as I shall argue, have in some respects been misguided. Hitherto much of the debate over ontic vagueness and quantum theory has centered on the “indeterminate identity” construal of ontic vagueness, and whether the quantum phenomenon of entanglement produces particles whose identity is indeterminate. I argue that this way (...) of framing the debate is mistaken. A more thorough examination of quantum theory and the phenomenon of entanglement reveals that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as supporting what I call the “vague property” construal of ontic vagueness, where vague properties are understood in terms of determinable properties without the corresponding determinates. (shrink)

This is not an overly ambitious paper. What I would like to do is to take a thesis that most people would regard as wildly implausible, and convince you that it is, in fact, false. What's worse, the argument I shall give is by no means airtight, though I hope it's reasonably convincing. The thesis has to do with the fuzzy boundaries of terms that refer to familiar middle-sized objects, terms like ‘Kilimanjaro’ and ‘the tallest mountain in Africa.’ It is (...) intuitively clear that Kilimanjaro has a fuzzy boundary, so that there are some clods of earth at the base of the mountain for which there isn't anything, either in our practices in using the word ‘Kilimanjaro’ or in the facts of geography, that determines an answer to the question whether the clod is a part of Kilimanjaro. (shrink)

The article introduces a special issue of the journal _Metaphysica_ on vagueness and ontology. The conventional view has it that all vagueness is semantic or representational. Russell, Dummett, Evans and Lewis, inter alia, have argued that the notion of “ontic” or “metaphysical” vagueness is not even intelligible. In recent years, a growing minority of philosophers have tried to make sense of the notion and have spelled it out in various ways. The article gives an overview and relates the idea of (...) ontic vagueness to the unquestioned phenomenon of fuzzy spatiotemporal boundaries and to the associated “problem of the many”. It briefly discusses the question of whether ontic vagueness can be spelled out in terms of “vague identity”, emphasizes the often neglected role of the difference between sortal and non-sortal ontologies and suggests a deflationary answer to the ill-conceived question of whether the “ultimate source” of vagueness lies either in language or in the world. (shrink)

Derek Parfit has offered numerous arguments in an attempt to establish that identity is not what matters. Jens Johannson has recently argued that Parfit's various arguments for the claim that identity is not what matters fail to establish what Parfit takes such arguments to establish. Johannson contends that this is due in part to the invalidity of one of Parfit's key arguments, and the fact that Parfit ignores a position that is compatible with the conclusions of his successful arguments and (...) the claim that identity is in fact what matters, namely, that I survive fission as either one of the fission products or the other, but it is indeterminate which one I survive as. I aim to establish here that both of Johannson's assertions are problematic. As a corollary of this task, I hope to shed some light on the relationship between indeterminacy and fission-based arguments for the claim that identity is not what matters. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 30-32, September 2012.

The central problem burdening common sense pluralism, as well as motivating the various Ockhamist reactions, is what has come to be called the problem of coincidence. Everyday thought and speech refer both to seals and to sealing wax, to kings and to human beings or bodies. Where the first coincides completely in space with the second, is there one object in that place, or two? The initial response of common sense is perhaps to dismiss the latter out of hand. The (...) king is a human, after all, and the seal a quantity of sealing wax. But once we note that the conditions for the persistence in time of such objects may differ, or that they differ in essential properties, the one-object option seems less appealing. If both exist, as pluralism asserts, and the seal can be destroyed without the wax ceasing to exist, then perhaps the best defense of common sense is to recognize that the seal and the sealing wax are two. (shrink)

How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance (...) as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffablestuff—then the suggestion that the self is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarilycall‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in theCategories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject. (shrink)

The basic philosophical controversy regarding ordinary objects is: Do tables and chairs, sticks and stones, exist? This paper aims to do two things: first, to explain why how this can be a controversy at all, and second, to explain why this controversy has arisen so late in the history of philosophy. Section 1 begins by discussing why the 'obvious' sensory evidence in favor of ordinary objects is not taken to be decisive. It goes on to review the standard arguments against (...) the existence of ordinary objects – including those based on problems with causal redundancy, parsimony, co-location, sorites arguments, and the special composition question. Section 2 goes on to address what it is about the contemporary approach to metaphysics that invites and sustains this kind of controversy, and helps make evident why debates about ordinary objects lead so readily to debates in metametaphysics about the nature of metaphysics itself. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker’s Constitution View of human persons has come under much recent scrutiny. Baker argues that each human person is constituted by, but not identical to, a human animal. Much of the critical discussion of Baker’s Constitution View has focused upon this aspect of her account. Less has been said about the positive diachronic account of personal identity offered by Baker. Baker argues that it is sameness of what she labels ‘first-person perspective’ that is essential to understanding personal identity (...) over time . Baker claims that her account avoids the commitment to indeterminacy of personal identity entailed by the psychological account. Further, the psychological account, but not her account, is plagued by what Baker labels the ‘duplication problem’. In the end, I argue that neither of these considerations forces us to renounce the psychological account and adopt Baker’s favored account. (shrink)

Recently a fascinating debate has been rekindled over whether vagueness is metaphysical or linguistic. That is, is vagueness an objective feature of reality or is it merely an artifact of our language? Bertrand Russell's contribution to this debate is considered by many to be decisive. Russell suggested that it is a mistake to conclude that the world is vague simply because the language we use to describe it is vague. He argued that to draw such an inference is to commit (...) "the fallacy of verbalism". I argue that this is only a fallacy if we have no reason to believe that the world is as our language says. Since vagueness is apparently not eliminable from our language—a fact that Russell himself acknowledged—an indispensability argument can be launched for metaphysical vagueness. In this paper I outliine such an argument. (shrink)

Remember the story of the most-most? It’s the story of that club in New York where people are the most of every type. There is the hairiest bald man and the baldest hairy man; the shortest giant and the tallest dwarf; the smartest idiot and the stupidest wise man. They are all there, including honest thieves and crippled acrobats. On Saturday night they have a party, eat, drink, dance. Then they have a contest. “And if you can tell the hairiest (...) bald man from the baldest hairy man—we are told—you get a prize.”. (shrink)

[1] We all know that language is vague. The majority of our terms admit borderline cases. We are notoriously unable to resolve the precise number grains required for a portion of sand to fall under the predicate "heap". It might be supposed that blurry boundaries are, at bottom, an ontological phenomenon. Perhaps the indeterminacy of our predicates is inherited from the indeterminacy of the properties they denote. Perhaps objects can also by vague, rendering singularly terms, including proper names, uncomfortably imprecise. (...) This thesis has been dismissed, challenged, and championed by various philosophers over the course of the century. Undoubtedly the most widely discussed objection to vague ontology comes in the form of a one-page argument devised by Gareth Evans (1978). Although other arguments against vague objects have been proposed,1 Evans' argument has occupied center stage, clarifying and provoking debate. Its impact reconfirms the value of Evans' philosophical legacy. (shrink)

This thesis analyses the ontological nature of quantum particles. In it I argue that quantum particles, despite their indistinguishability, are objects in much the same way as classical particles. This similarity provides an important point of continuity between classical and quantum physics. I consider two notions of indistinguishability, that of indiscernibility and permutation symmetry. I argue that neither sort of indistinguishability undermines the identity of quantum particles. I further argue that, when we understand in distinguishability in terms of permutation symmetry, (...) classical particles are just as indistinguishable as quantum particles; for classical physics also possesses permutation symmetry. (shrink)

This is a copy of my DPhil thesis, the abstract for which is as follows: The first third of this thesis argues for a B-theoretic conception of time according to which all times exist equally and the present is in no way privileged. I distinguish "ontological" A-theories from "non-ontological" ones, arguing that the latter are experientially unmotivated and barely coherent. With regard to the former, I focus mainly on presentism. After some remarks on how to formulate this (and eternalism) non-trivially, (...) I review the non-relativistic case against presentism. I then consider the impact of Special Relativity on the debate, and attempt to deepen this impact by supplying a modal variation on the standard arguments. The middle third of the thesis investigates persistence, contending that both endurance and perdurance are consonant with the eternalism already endorsed. After introducing these theories of persistence, and discussing in particular how best to formulate an eternalist endurance, I proceed to defend the coherence of this combination. The Problem of Change is addressed here. I then respond in some detail to recent allegations of relativistic threats to endurance. The final third of the thesis questions the validity of the endurantist-perdurantist dispute. I criticize two recently proposed translation schemes that aim to show this dispute to be non-substantive. However, the second scheme suggests a doctrine of "Ontological Equivalence" which I develop and consider. I then address the Rotating Discs Argument, using this to launch a discussion of identity, genidentity, and the relationship between them. (shrink)

I propose a fourfold categorisation of entities according to whether or not they possess determinate identity-conditions and whether or not they are determinately countable. Some entities – which I call ‘individual objects’ – have both determinate identity and determinate countability: for example, persons and animals. In the case of entities of a kind K belonging to this category, we are in principle always entitled to expect there to be determinate answers to such questions as ‘Is x the same K as (...) y?’ and ’How many Ks are there satisfying condition C?’, even if we may sometimes be unable in practice to discover what these answers are. But other entities apparently lack either determinate identity, or determinate countability, or both. In these terms I try to explain certain important ontological differences between familiar macroscopic objects and various rather more esoteric entities, such as the ‘particles’ of quantum physics, quantities of material stuff, and tropes or property instances. (shrink)

It has been suggested that quantum particles are genuinelyvague objects (Lowe 1994a). The present work explores thissuggestion in terms of the various metaphysical packages that areavailable for describing such particles. The formal frameworksunderpinning such packages are outlined and issues of identityand reference are considered from this overall perspective. Indoing so we hope to illuminate the diverse ways in whichvagueness can arise in the quantum context.

There is a general form of an argument which I call the ‘argument from vagueness’ which attempts to show that objects persist by perduring, via the claim that vagueness is never ontological in nature and thus that composition is unrestricted. I argue that even if we grant that vagueness is always the result of semantic indeterminacy rather than ontological vagueness, and thus also grant that composition is unrestricted, it does not follow that objects persist by perduring. Unrestricted mereological composition lacks (...) the power to ensure that there exist instantaneous objects that wholly overlap persisting objects at times, and thus lacks the power to ensure that there exists anything that could be called a temporal part. Even if we grant that such instantaneous objects exist, however, I argue that it does not follow that objects perdure. To show this I briefly outline a coherent version of three dimensionalism that grants just such an assumption. Thus considerations pertaining to the nature of vagueness need not lead us inevitably to accept perdurantism. (shrink)

According to one account, vagueness is "metaphysical." The friend of metaphysical vagueness believes that, for some object and some property, there can be no determinate fact of the matter whether that object exemplifies that property. A second account maintains that vagueness is due only to ignorance. According to the epistemic account, vagueness is explained completely by and is nothing over and above our not knowing some relevant fact or facts. These are the minority views. The dominant position maintains that there (...) is a third possible variety of vagueness, linguistic vagueness. And, it goes on to insist, all vagueness is of this third variety. I shall argue, however, that linguistic vagueness is not a third variety of vagueness. Either it is a species of metaphysical vagueness or a kind of ignorance. And this, I argue, makes trouble for the claim that all vagueness is linguistic. (shrink)

Our states of belief and desire are no doubt supervenient on the overall pattern of our physical states. But can this minimal physicalist presumption be strengthened into a claim to the effect that our mental states are each identical with some specific corresponding physical state? A developed identity theory will need, in a sense to be made clear, a schema for specifying the physical state which is supposed to be identical with a given mental state. And there are problems in (...) formulating such a schema. The special difficulties faced here by a type identity theory are well known, and will not be discussed further in this present paper. But equally, there are problems in constructing an identification schema for employment with a token identity theory. (shrink)

The debate about cinematic motion revolves around the question of whether the movement of cinematic images is real. That the movement we perceive in film should be construed as the movement of images is taken for granted. But this is a mistake. There is no reason to suppose that cinematic images of moving objects are themselves perceived to be moving. All that is necessary is to perceive these images as continuously changing images of one and the same object.

I present a new approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness.

This essay argues for internalism in maintaining that there is a sense of “determination” – namely “a selection of one” – according to which phenomenological content determines the object of an experience. The subject may not be able to describe the object in a way which distinguishes it from all other objects, but the object is nevertheless determined by the unity of sense, or noema, which presents it.

This article explores the connection between Boolean-valued class models of set theory and the theory of arbitrary objects in roughly Kit Fine’s sense of the word. In particular, it explores the hypothesis that the set-theoretic universe as a whole can be seen as an arbitrary entity. According to this view, the set-theoretic universe can be in many different states. These states are structurally like Boolean-valued models, and they contain sets conceived of as variable or arbitrary objects.

Theologies of divine action in nature have sought to maximize traction with the sciences to secure their credibility. While varying in significant ways, all extant proposals share a commitment to physical realism, the claim that (at least some) physical entities and facts are both mind‐independent and ontologically basic within creation. However, I will argue that this metaphysical commitment undermines the body of scientific knowledge to which theologians wish to be responsive. Is there an alternative? Building on the work of Howard (...) Robinson, I will show that there is a coherent account of mind's place in nature that denies physical realism. Such an account would enable a theological description of God's sustaining and governing action in nature through the ontological mediation of minds and laws causally constraining their sensations. Furthermore, this proposal yields a positive research program that makes essential use of the contributions of the natural sciences to understand the nature of embodiment. (shrink)

Questions of identity over time are often hard to answer. A long tradition has it that such questions are somehow soft: they have no unique, determinate answer, and disagreements about them are merely verbal. I argue that this claim is not the truism it is taken to be. Depending on how it is understood, it turns out either to be false or to presuppose a highly contentious metaphysical claim.

I argue that the ‘aoristic’ operators, which are intended to describe the logic of vagueness, do not form a standard modal logic. I redefine the operators so that they do form a standard modal logic, provide a semantics of that logic, and argue that the logic is not as strong as standardly claimed.

We define the paraconsistent supra-logic Pσ by a type-shift from the booleans o of propositional logic Po to the supra-booleans σ of the propositional type logic P obtained as the propositional fragment of the transfinite type theory Q defined by Peter Andrews (North-Holland Studies in Logic 1965) as a classical foundation of mathematics. The supra-logic is in a sense a propositional logic only, but since there is an infinite number of supra-booleans and arithmetical operations are available for this and other (...) types, virtually anything can be specified. The supra-logic is a generalization of Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic, with the intermediate value duplicated many times and ordered such that none of the copies of this value imply other ones, but it differs from Lukasiewicz's many-valued logics as well as from logics based on bilattices. There are several automated theorem provers for classical higher order logic (finite type theory) and it should be possible to modify these to our needs. (shrink)

Gareth Evans has argued influentially against vague identities. David Lewis and Theodore Sider have argued against vague parthood. Much of the distaste among philosophers for metaphysical vagueness is sourced in these arguments. I argue that even if the considerations adduced by Evans, Lewis and Sider are conclusive, metaphysical boundary vagueness remains possible.