In this paper I confront what I take to be the crucial challenge for fictional realism, i.e. the view that fictional characters exist. This is the problem of accounting for the intuition that corresponding negative existentials such as ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ are true (when, given fictional realism, taken literally they seem false). I advance a novel and detailed form of the response according to which we take them to mean variants of such claims as: there is no concrete (...) x such that x is Sherlock Holmes. (shrink)

Précis for a book symposium, with contributions from Meg Wallace, Louis deRosset, and Chris Tillman and Joshua Spencer.

According to standard, pre-philosophical intuitions, there are many composite objects in the physical universe. There is, for example, my bicycle, which is composed of various parts - wheels, handlebars, molecules, atoms, etc. Recently, a growing body of philosophical literature has concerned itself with questions about the nature of composition.1 The main question that has been raised about composition is, roughly, this: Under what circumstances do some things compose, or add up to, or form, a single object? It turns out that (...) it is surprisingly difficult to give a satisfactory answer to this question that accords with standard, pre-philosophical intuitions about the universe's composite objects. In fact, the three rival views in response to this question that have received the most support in the literature are (i) that there are no objects composed of two or more parts (which means that there are no stars, chairs, humans, or bicycles);2 (ii) that the only objects composed of two or more parts are living organisms (which still means no stars. (shrink)

Defense of a psychological account of what it is for an artwork to be complete.

Precis of my book by this title, for a symposium.

Persistence through time is like extension through space. A road has spatial parts in the subregions of the region of space it occupies; likewise, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies. This view — known variously as four dimensionalism, the doctrine of temporal parts, and the theory that objects “perdure” — is opposed to “three dimensionalism”, the doctrine that things “endure”, or are “wholly present”.1 I will (...) attempt to resolve this dispute in favor of four dimensionalism by means of a novel argument based on considerations of vagueness. But before argument in this area can be productive, I believe we must become much clearer than is customary about exactly what the dispute is, for the usual ways of formulating the dispute are flawed, especially where three dimensionalism is concerned. (shrink)

Sider’s (2001) modification of the Lewisean argument from vagueness for unrestricted mereological composition is advertised as having the advantage over the original that the assumption of the semantic determinacy of ‘part of’ (its lack of multiple eligible precisifications) is not required. This is not so; without this assumption the crucial step in Sider’s defence of his most contentious premiss, (P3), is one no defender of the linguistic theory of vagueness is obliged to take. Since the aim of the argument is (...) precisely to show that a defender of the linguistic theory of vagueness must accept unrestricted mereological composition the argument has no advantage over Lewis’s. (shrink)

Words, languages, symphonies, fictional characters, games, and recipes are plausibly abstract artifacts— entities that have no spatial location and that are deliberately brought into existence as a result of creative acts. Many accept that composition is unrestricted: for every plurality of material objects, there is a material object that is the sum of those objects. These two views may seem entirely unrelated. I will argue that the most influential argument against restricted composition—the vagueness argument—doubles as an argument that there can (...) be no abstract artifacts. There is no way to resist the vagueness argument against abstract artifacts that does not also undermine the vagueness argument against restricted composition. (shrink)

Various criticisms have been brought against a Platonistic construal of the musical work: that is, against the view that the musical work is a universal or kind or type, of which the performances are instances or tokens. Some of these criticisms are: that musical works possess perceptual properties and universals do not; that musical works are created and universals cannot be; that universals cannot be destroyed and musical works can; that parts of tokens of the same type can be interchanged (...) and still yield tokens of that type, whereas we cannot interchange parts of performances of the same work and still get performances of the work. Of these claims, and seem to be true, but are not incompatible with a Platonistic construal of the musical work, whereas and just seem to be false and, therefore, of no concern to the musical Platonist. (shrink)

Various criticisms have been brought against a Platonistic construal of the musical work: that is, against the view that the musical work is a universal or kind or type, of which the performances are instances or tokens. Some of these criticisms are: (1) that musical works possess perceptual properties and universals do not; (2) that musical works are created and universals cannot be; (3) that universals cannot be destroyed and musical works can; (4) that parts of tokens of the same (...) type can be interchanged and still yield tokens of that type, whereas we cannot interchange parts of performances of the same work and still get performances of the work. Of these claims, (1) and (2) seem to be true, but are not incompatible with a Platonistic construal of the musical work, whereas (3) and (4) just seem to be false and, therefore, of no concern to the musical Platonist. (shrink)

Various criticisms have been brought against a Platonistic construal of the musical work: that is, against the view that the musical work is a universal or kind or type, of which the performances are instances or tokens. Some of these criticisms are: (1) that musical works possess perceptual properties and universals do not; (2) that musical works are created and universals cannot be; (3) that universals cannot be destroyed and musical works can; (4) that parts of tokens of the same (...) type can be interchanged and still yield tokens of that type, whereas we cannot interchange parts of performances of the same work and still get performances of the work. Of these claims, (1) and (2) seem to be true, but are not incompatible with a Platonistic construal of the musical work, whereas (3) and (4) just seem to be false and, therefore, of no concern to the musical Platonist. (shrink)

Vague existence can seem like the worst kind of vagueness in the world, or seem to be an entirely unintelligible notion. This bad reputation is based upon the rumour that if there is vague existence then there are non-existent objects. But the rumour is false: the modest brand of vague existence entailed by certain metaphysical theories of composition does not deserve its bad reputation.

Identities formed with proper names may be contingent. this claim is made first through an example. the paper then develops a theory of the semantics of concrete things, with contingent identity as a consequence. this general theory lets concrete things be made up canonically from fundamental physical entities. it includes theories of proper names, variables, cross-world identity with respect to a sortal, and modal and dispositional properties. the theory, it is argued, is coherent and superior to its rivals, in that (...) it stems naturally from a systematic picture of the physical world. (shrink)

Musical Platonists identify musical works with abstract sound structures but this implies that they are not created but only discovered. Jerrold Levinson adapts Platonism to allow for creation by identifying musical works with indicated sound structures. In this paper I explore the similarities between Levinson's view and Kit Fine's theory of qua objects. Fine offers the theory of qua objects as an account of constitution, as it obtains, for example, between a statue and the clay the statue is made out (...) of. I argue that Fine's theory does not adequately characterize the constitution relation and that the problems it faces extend to Levinson's account of musical works as indicated structures. I develop an alternative theory of constitution, based on the notion of being made out of. This approach to constitution enables me to offer an account of musical works as abstract objects that are constituted by sound structures. I argue that my account has several advantages over the Levinson/Fine approach. (shrink)

In this article, I articulate and defend an account of corporations motivated by John Searle’s discussion of them in his Making the Social World. According to this account, corporations are abstract entities that are the products of status function Declarations. They are also connected with, though not reducible to, various people and certain of the power relations among them. Moreover, these connections are responsible for corporations having features that stereotypical abstract entities lack (e.g., the abilities to take actions and make (...) profits). (shrink)

David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection between composition and existence that Lewis assumes. On the resulting view, in troublesome cases of vague composition, there is an object, (...) which definitely exists, about which it is vague whether the relevant borderline parts compose it. (shrink)

If musical works are abstract objects, which cannot enter into causal relations, then how can we refer to musical works or know anything about them? Worse, how can any of our musical experiences be experiences of musical works? It would be nice to be able to sidestep these questions altogether. One way to do that would be to take musical works to be concrete objects. In this paper, we defend a theory according to which musical works are concrete objects. In (...) particular, the theory that we defend takes musical works to be fusions of performances. We defend this view from a series of objections, the first two of which are raised by Julian Dodd in a recent paper and the last of which is suggested by some comments of his in an earlier paper. (shrink)

Many materialist ontologies characterize the existence of everyday, middle-sized objects as reducible to collections or mereological sums of smaller, more fundamental particle constituents. Baker would have it otherwise and has set out a defence of her Constitution View of ontology that takes everyday objects to be irreducibly real and of a vast array of kinds.Motivating an interest in the metaphysics of everyday objects is not obviously straightforward when contemporary metaphysics is filled with attempts to answer seemingly more challenging questions about (...) the existence of disputed classes of objects, such as abstracta, or very specific, unusual phenomena such as holes, rather than the mundane case of these middle-sized concreta. Yet this is Baker's point: that many kinds of ordinary objects have been overlooked by philosophers to the point where we lack an adequate account of their significance in our practices and attitudes. Moreover, in a climate of metaphysics often governed by those of a strong eliminitivist inclination with a preference for Quinean desert landscapes, the advocating of an almost indulgent ontological pluralism is enough to make this book worth reading.Those familiar with Baker's work will not be surprised that this approach to ontology is grounded from her perspective of ‘Practical Realism’. This view – partly a legacy of Aristotle, partly of G. E. …. (shrink)

Simon J. Evnine explores the view that some objects have matter from which they are distinct but that this distinctness is not due to the existence of anything like a form. He draws on Aristotle's insight that such objects must be understood in terms of an account that links what they are essentially with how they come to exist and what their functions are. Artifacts are the most prominent kind of objects where these three features coincide, and Evnine develops a (...) detailed account of the existence and identity conditions of artifacts, and the origins of their functions, in terms of how they come into existence. He then extends this account to organisms, where evolution accomplishes what is effected by intentional making in the case of artifacts, and to actions, which are seen as artifactual events. (shrink)

One of the central questions of material-object metaphysics is which highly visible objects there are right before our eyes. Daniel Z. Korman defends a conservative view, according to which our ordinary, natural judgments about which objects there are are more or less correct. He begins with an overview of the arguments that have led people away from the conservative view, into revisionary views according to which there are far more objects than we ordinarily take there to be or far fewer. (...) Korman criticizes a variety of compatibilist strategies, according to which these revisionary views are actually compatible with our ordinary beliefs. He goes on to respond to debunking arguments; objections that the conservative's verdicts about which objects that are and aren't are objectionably arbitrary; the argument from vagueness; the overdetermination argument; the argument from material constitution; and the problem of the many. (shrink)

This challenging study places fiction squarely at the centre of the discussion of metaphysics. Philosophers have traditionally treated fiction as involving a set of narrow problems in logic or the philosophy of language. By contrast Amie Thomasson argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. The book develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. By understanding fictional characters we come to understand how (...) other cultural and social objects are established on the basis of the independent physical world and the mental states of human beings. (shrink)

Reference and Existence, Saul Kripke's John Locke Lectures for 1973, can be read as a sequel to his classic Naming and Necessity. It confronts important issues left open in that work -- among them, the semantics of proper names and natural kind terms as they occur in fiction and in myth; negative existential statements; the ontology of fiction and myth. In treating these questions, he makes a number of methodological observations that go beyond the framework of his earlier book -- (...) including the striking claim that fiction cannot provide a test for theories of reference and naming. In addition, these lectures provide a glimpse into the transition to the pragmatics of singular reference that dominated his influential paper, " Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference " -- a paper that helped reorient linguistic and philosophical semantics. Some of the themes have been worked out in later writings by other philosophers -- many influenced by typescripts of the lectures in circulation -- but none have approached the careful, systematic treatment provided here. The virtuosity of Naming and Necessity -- the colloquial ease of the tone, the dazzling, on-the-spot formulations, the logical structure of the overall view gradually emerging over the course of the lectures -- is on display here as well. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains and (...) microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects. (shrink)