Toward a Commonsense Answer to the Special Composition Question

The special composition question is the question, ‘When do some things compose something?’ The answers to this question in the literature have largely been at odds with common sense, either by allowing that any two things (no matter how apparently unrelated) compose something, or by denying the existence of most ordinary composite objects. I propose a new ‘series-style’ answer to the special composition question that accords much more closely with common sense, and I defend this answer from van Inwagen's objections. Specifically, I will argue (among other things) that the proposed answer entails the transitivity of parthood, that it is non-circular, and that it casts some light on the ancient puzzle about the Ship of Theseus.     

Going Topless

The view that people go where their brains go remains popular in discussions of personal identity. But since the brain is only a small part of the body, defenders of that view need to provide an account of what it is that makes the brain specially relevant to personal identity. The standard answer is that the brain is special because it is the carrier of psychological continuity. But Peter van Inwagen has recently offered (in Material Beings ) an alternative account of the brain' special relevance. Those who reject the view that we go with our brains obviously need to respond to this new account. According to van Inwagen, there is an important difference between the life-support requirements of a severed head and those of a headless body: whereas a severed head would need only a pump to survive, a headless body would need the functional equivalent of a computer in its life-support system. It follows, according to van Inwagen, that we go with our brains. In this paper I argue that van Inwagen's argument is doubly defective: the inference from his premisses to his conclusion is dubious; and in any case his premisses misrepresent the relevant physiological facts.     

Against Limited Foreknowledge

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’.     

Peter Van Inwagen on Material Beings

Peter van Inwagen's book Material Beings is centered on the special composition question: the question of when some simples constitute a complex object. Van Inwagen's answer to this question is that simples only constitute a complex object when they constitute an organism. I argue that van Inwagen's reasoning in favor of this conclusion is unconvincing, and also that the significance of the special composition question itself is doubtful.     

A Relevance Constraint on Composition

Whether certain objects compose a whole at a given time does not seem to depend on anything other than the character of those objects and the relations between them. This observation suggests a far-reaching constraint on theories of composition. One version of the constraint has been explicitly adopted by van Inwagen and rules out his own answer to the composition question. The constraint also rules out the other well-known moderate answers that have so far been proposed.     

Can God Create Abstract Objects? A Reply to Peter van Inwagen

The Platonic theist Peter van Inwagen argues that God cannot create abstract objects. Thus, the quantifier ‘everything’ in traditional statements of the doctrine of creation should be appropriately restricted to things that can enter into causal relations and abstract objects cannot: ‘God is the creator of everything distinct from himself…that can enter into causal relations.’ I respond to van Inwagen arguing that he has provided no good reason for thinking abstract objects must be uncreated. And if this is the case, then there is no good reason to think that God cannot create abstract objects.     

Particularism about Composition

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.     

Some Ontological Consequences of Atomism

Is there a fundamental layer of objects in nature? And if so what sorts of things populate it? Among those who answer ‘yes’ to the first question, a common answer to the second is ‘atoms,’ where an atom is understood in the original sense of an object that is spatially unextended, indivisible, and wholly lacking in proper parts (whether actual or potential). Here I explore some of the ontological consequences of atomism. First, if atoms are real, then whatever motion they appear to undergo must be discrete (discontinuous). The link between atomism and discrete motion goes back at least to Aristotle and is admitted by some atomists, but the full significance of that admission has been neglected. I argue that a commitment to discrete motion in turn entails significant and sometimes counter‐intuitive results. I also examine the implications of these results for the philosophy of mind and for discussions of metaphysical naturalism.     

Object‐Dependent Thought Without Illusion

When unknowingly experiencing a perceptual hallucination, a subject can attempt to think specifically about what is, as far as he or she can tell, the perceived object. Is the subject then deceived about his or her cognitive situation? I answer negatively. Moreover, I argue that this answer is compatible with holding that thought specifically about a certain object – singular thought – is object‐dependent. By contrast, both critics and advocates of the view that singular thought is object‐dependent have assumed this view to be committed to postulation of illusions of object‐dependent thought in cases like that mentioned. The core ingredient in my illusion‐free version of the view is a special form of disjunctivism. Alleged cases of illusion are not considered parasitic on ‘the good case’ where the object thought about is perceived.     

What Is It Like to Be an Alien?

This brief article is concerned with an aspect of Jonathan Glover's book, Alien Landscapes?. After reflecting a little on the book as a whole, the question that is taken up is, ‘Why might a book that seeks to help those without mental disorders understand what they are like “from the inside” be of interest to laymen and practitioners in the criminal law?’. One answer lies in part in the way that ‘what it is like from the inside’ might interact with judgements of criminal responsibility. Taking its cue from examples used by Glover the article considers, and puts pressure on, the ‘dual view’ he proposes: that when dealing with those with mental disorders we should treat them as responsible agents in the sense of not withholding from them Strawson's ‘reactive attitudes’, while nevertheless accepting that their personalities and behaviours are the results of large doses of ‘bad luck’.     

Which Desires Are Relevant to Well‐Being?

The desire‐satisfaction theory of well‐being says, in its simplest form, that a person's level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, Which desires? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn't much discussed in the well‐being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person is, for some reason or other, disposed to act so as to try to get it, and what a person wants in a more robust sense, the sense of being genuinely attracted to the thing. I try to make this distinction more clear, and I argue for its axiological relevance by putting it to work in solving four problem cases for desire satisfactionism. The theory defended holds that only desires in the latter, genuine‐attraction sense are relevant to welfare.     

What Do Powers Do When They Are Not Manifested?*

In the present paper, I offer a conceptual argument against the view that all properties are pure powers. I claim that thinking of all properties as pure powers leads to a regress. The regress, I argue, can be solved only if non‐powers are admitted. The kernel of my thesis is that any attempt to answer the title question in an informative way will undermine a pure‐power view of properties. In particular, I focus my critique on recent arguments in favour of pure powers by the Late George Molnar and Jennifer McKitrick. The lines of defence of the friends of powers converge on what I call ‘the ultimate argument for powers’, viz., that current physics entails (or supports) the view that the fundamental properties (spin, mass, charge) are ungrounded powers. I take issue with this argument and make a modest suggestion: that the evidence from current physics is inconclusive.     

Rearranging the Furniture

Philosophia - According to Peter van Inwagen, there are, from the point of view of serious metaphysics, no (non-living) composites, only simples. Saying that we have built a ship is a misleading...     

The local problem of God’s hiddenness: a critique of van Inwagen’s criterion of philosophical success

In regards to the problem of evil, van Inwagen thinks there are two arguments from evil which require different defenses. These are the global argument from evil—that there exists evil in general, and the local argument from evil—that there exists some particular atrocious evil X. However, van Inwagen fails to consider whether the problem of God’s hiddenness also has a “local” version: whether there is in fact a “local” argument from God’s hiddenness which would be undefeated by his general defense of God’s hiddenness. This paper will argue that van Inwagen’s present account contains no implicit response to the “local” argument from God’s hiddenness, and, worse, the “local” argument brings to the fore crucial inconsistencies in van Inwagen’s account. These inconsistencies concern van Inwagen’s criterion for philosophical success—his methodological use of an “ideal audience” in an ideal debate—and a crucial premise in his argument: namely, that people who do not believe in God are culpably deceiving themselves regarding the manifest presence of God. These considerations will be a platform for my arguing that the failures of van Inwagen’s account amount to his ignoring the extra-rational, concrete aspect of grasping “spiritual propositions”—propositions which, in order to be affirmed, require the full self-understanding which precipitates out of the mind, body, and will of a particular existing individual.     

Plural self-awareness

It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case.     

Empirical Theology: inter‐ or intra‐disciplinary?

This article seeks to reflect on the methodology of what has come to be called ‘empirical theology’. In particular it considers the question of how theology might relate to the social sciences. The more established expression is what is called the ‘inter‐disciplinary’ approach. This has been advocated by both sociologists and religious educationalists. In contrast, Johannes van der Ven, Professor of Practical Theology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, advocates an ‘intra‐disciplinary’ approach. This approach is innovative in seeking to incorporate social science methods within a theological framework. The contention of the article is that while some forms of inter‐disciplinary approaches are potentially more rigorous they are not without difficulty. Theologians, however, have been given a valuable model of how theology might relate to the social sciences by means of van der Ven's approach. It now remains for the practical theological community of scholars to assess it.     

How Morality Can Be Absent from Moral Arguments

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument.     

Undermining Motivations for Universalism

Universalism (the thesis that for any ys, those ys compose a further object) is an answer to the Special Composition Question. In the literature there are three arguments – what I call the arguments from elegance – that universalists often rely upon, but which are rarely examined in‐depth. I argue that these motivations cannot be had by the perdurantist, for to avoid a commitment to badly behaved superluminal objects perdurantists must answer the ‘Proper Continuant Question’. Any answer to that question necessarily ensures that there is a restricted answer to the Special Composition Question that is just as elegant as universalism. Thus, if you are a perdurantist, the arguments from elegance fail to motivate universalism for there will always be a restricted composition that is just as good.     

COMPOSITION AS A SECONDARY QUALITY

Abstract: The ‘special composition question’ is this: given objects O₁, . . . , O_n, under what conditions is there an object O, such that O₁, . . . , O_n compose O? This paper explores a heterodox answer to this question, one that casts composition as a secondary quality. According to the approach I want to consider, there is an O that O₁, . . . , O_n compose (roughly) just in case a normal intuiter would, under normal conditions, intuit that there is.