P. GOGGANS
HOW NOT TO HAVE AN ONTOLOGY OF PHYSICAL
OBJECTS
(Received April 1999)
“Under what conditions do physical things compose something?”
“What sorts of physical objectsare there?” “Are there many physical
things, or only one?” Peter van Inwagen proposes answers to these
questions in his recent Material Beings.
1
There are a number of
other views on the market. Four-dimensionalism, first advanced by
W. V. Quine and later endorsed by David Lewis and others, says that
every “filled” region of space-time constitutes an object.
2
The three-
dimensional counterpart of this view is mereological universalism,
according to which every collection of objects has a sum.
3
Van
Inwagen proposes that things compose something if and only if their
activity constitutes a life.
Philosophers may react to these questions in one of three ways.
They may reject them as uninteresting. They may find them inter-
esting, and try to answer them. Or, they may find them interesting,
but suspect that there is a deep problem with the questions them-
selves. The view defended here will appeal most to the suspicious
crowd. According to this view, the sentences that ontologists utter
in attempts to express their theses in fact do not express proposi-
tions. That is, they do not express propositions in isolation from a
larger descriptive context. Nevertheless, they can serve as proposals
for ways of speaking. One may stipulate that a certain “ontological
sentence” shall be a part of a description, and proceed to fill in the
description with other sentences that are outwardly consistent with
the ontological sentences. For example, if the ontologicalsentenceis
“No objects are parts,” the description willnot contain any sentences
of the form “x is a part of y.” At some point the description may
become detailed or “rich” enough to permit someone who looks at it
todevelop an intuitive sense of how to continuedescribingtheworld
in the manner already established by the description. At that point,
relative to the semantic frame of reference thus established, one
Philosophical Studies 94: 295–308, 1999.
c
1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.