Is there a tension between this paper and your previous post on truthmaker theory and priority monism? The thought I am having is that if we are mereological nihilists about what really exists then shouldn't we say that whatever The One is that is the priority monist's truthmaker it can only be a mereological simple?
I don't think there is any tension. TM and OC doesn't actually defend the view that we should be nihilists about what there really is. What's defended there is not an ontology but a metaontology. A bunch of options are given, one of which, indeed, is that all that there really is is the mereological sum of every thing, which makes it true that all its proper parts exist (but not, obviously, that they really exist.) So no tension: TM and OC gives us a metaontology, and the monism paper argues for a particular ontology.
Agreed, probably should have read through to section 6. It looked like you were trying to use the metaontological result to underpin an argument for mereological nihilism.
3 comments:
Hi Ross,
Is there a tension between this paper and your previous post on truthmaker theory and priority monism? The thought I am having is that if we are mereological nihilists about what really exists then shouldn't we say that whatever The One is that is the priority monist's truthmaker it can only be a mereological simple?
Duncan
Hi Duncan,
I don't think there is any tension. TM and OC doesn't actually defend the view that we should be nihilists about what there really is. What's defended there is not an ontology but a metaontology. A bunch of options are given, one of which, indeed, is that all that there really is is the mereological sum of every thing, which makes it true that all its proper parts exist (but not, obviously, that they really exist.) So no tension: TM and OC gives us a metaontology, and the monism paper argues for a particular ontology.
Agreed, probably should have read through to section 6. It looked like you were trying to use the metaontological result to underpin an argument for mereological nihilism.
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