Particularism about Composition |
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| Authors: | John Gabriel |
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| Affiliation: | Department of Philosophy, Washington University in Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO |
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| Abstract: | Unwilling to adopt the radical ontologies that leading answers to van Inwagen's special composition question imply, Ned Markosian proposes that there is no true, non‐trivial, and finitely long answer to the SCQ. On my usage, this makes Markosian a particularist about composition. I argue that an improved version of Markosian's particularism fails because it cannot explain how sense perception justifies many of the ordinary‐object beliefs we base on it. I further argue that psychologists' research on object perception suggests that general principles govern how we perceptually discriminate unified wholes from mere pluralities, and this narrows the range of answers to the SCQ available to commonsense ontologists. |
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