Extract
Borderline simple or extremely simple (1).
In his Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen distinguishes two questions about parthood. What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for some things jointly to compose a whole? What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for a thing to have proper parts? The first of these, the Special Composition Question (SCQ), has been widely discussed, and David Lewis has argued that an important constraint on any answer to the SCQ is that it should not permit borderline cases of composition. This is a far-reaching claim, since many plausible-seeming accounts of composition do permit borderline cases. Ned Markosian has recently directed our attention to the second, the neglected Inverse Special Composition Question (ISCQ). I will argue that those who accept Lewis's constraint on answers to the SCQ should accept an analogous constraint on answers to the ISCQ, and I will discuss the effects of such a constraint. (2)
I. ACCOUNTS OF COMPOSITION AND OF SIMPLICITY What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for some objects jointly to compose something? There are two extreme answers to this Special Composition Question: any conditions are sufficient; no conditions are sufficient. Universalists believe that there are no restrictions on composition: take any plurality of objects whatsoever, no matter how scattered or diverse, there is something those objects compose. Nihilists believe that composition never occurs: no matter how integrated some objects are, there is nothing they compose (except perhaps that each object composes itself). (3) These extreme answers are straightforward, but they do not match our untutored beliefs about what there is: universalists claim that there are far more material things than we had ever dreamed of, while nihilists do not believe in the objects of everyday life, of chemistry or even of atomic physics. Extremists must provide a story about why the rest of us appear to believe in either more or fewer objects than there really are: perhaps ordinary talk about baseballs does not really conflict with the metaphysician's denial that baseballs exist, or perhaps we ordinarily but fallaciously infer the non-existence of scattered objects from their insignificance. (4) Extremist measures are supposed to be necessary because more moderate answers to the SCQ, according to which some but not all pluralities have a sum, are alleged to have a fatal flaw. The argument is roughly this: if an...See the full content of this document
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