Abstract
Recently, Jonathan Tallant has argued that we should reject priority views, which hold that some objects are fundamental and others are dependent. Tallant’s argument relies on two proposed mereological possibilities: a gunky world, where everything has a proper part, and a junky world, where everything is a proper part. In this paper, I criticise Tallant’s argument and argue that neither of these possibilities threaten priority views per se; at most, they threaten only particular forms of priority views that contain a certain independently controversial assumption. First, I defend priority pluralism against the gunk argument: the genuine conceivability of gunk can be plausibly doubted on the basis of a certain principle concerning metaphysical possibility, and even if this principle is false, the possibility of a gunky world poses no devastative problem for pluralism per se because it can be considered to be consistent with nonatomism. Second, I defend priority monism against the junk argument: the possibility of a junky world poses no devastative problem for monism per se because it can be considered to be consistent with nonholism in a twofold sense. Finally, I show that even monism as defined as genuinely holistic can be plausibly defended against the junk argument once the claim of the possible nonexistence of the maximal whole is reinterpreted based on the priority-based conception of existence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Tallant gives no explicit definitions of these two positions, but their intended contents seem to be contextually clear.
The assumption of exhaustiveness will be questioned in §2.2 and §3.1 below.
This argument is reconstructed in a way that explains the assumption about the modal status of PVs more explicitly. The same reconstruction applies to the JA below.
Even this interpretation has difficulty in establishing a ‘bottom level’ independent of considerations of parthood. To establish that, in any gunky world, a metaphysical explanation must result in infinite descent, it seems inevitable to resort to a mereological fact that is supposedly implied by the truth of pluralism: that the parts are prior to their whole.
Note that Tallant does not reject, as such, this property-based way of assigning the’priority’ and ‘fundamentality’ to objects. See Tallant (2013: 436–7). It should also be noted that O’Connor and Jacobs (2003) commit themselves to the view that only mereological atoms and those composites that have emergent properties really exist: ‘[composites] lacking [emergent properties], however much they may appear to be unified to the uneducated eye, are individual objects only by a courtesy born of practical concerns’ (O’Connor and Jacobs 2003: 547).
Whether those who employ this argument must regard the middle level in question as fundamental in every possible world depends on whether every conclusion about fundamentality, including those about which specific form of pluralism is true, is necessarily true if true at all.
In support of the thesis that the only viable form of pluralism is atomism, Schaffer argues as follows: ‘the pluralist might reject Atomism, maintaining that what is basic is mereologically intermediate. But this seems objectionably arbitrary, especially in cases where there is no natural joint in the mereological structure. For instance, in the case of a homogeneously pink sphere of gunk, . . . [n]o layer of decomposition seems privileged’ (Schaffer 2010: 63, my emphasis). Here Schaffer begs the question by assuming that there are ‘cases where there is no natural joint in the mereological structure’.
If Composition as Identity—the thesis that a mereological whole is identical to its parts taken together—is true, the distinction between W-holism and P-holism vanishes, and with it the distinction between W-monism and P-monism. This fact, however, poses no issue to those with a monistic view who argue against the JA: the point of the counterargument here is that the truth of P-monism, which is one of the two apparently different positions in question, is consistent with the world being junky.
Schaffer (2009: 362–5). In a similar vein, K. Fine says: ‘[T]he intended import of the various realist/anti-realist positions will rest upon adopting a realist stand in the usual sense, i.e., upon supposing that there are Fs. . . . The realist and anti-realist about natural numbers, for example, will most likely take themselves to be disagreeing on the reality of natural numbers—0, 1, 2, . . .; and this would not be possible unless each of them supposed that there were the numbers 0, 1, 2, . . . . . . . Thus, far from being at odds with the anti-realist position, realism—as it is usually understood—will be a common presupposition of the anti-realist and realist positions’ (Fine 2009: 169).
Schaffer (2009: 356–62). In the same vein, Fine writes: ‘[T]he answer[s] to . . . quantificational questions [about numbers and chairs] are trivial. Thus given the evident fact that there is a prime number greater than 2, it trivially follows that there is a number (an x such that x is a number); and, similarly, given the event fact that I am sitting on a chair, it trivially follows that there is a chair (an x such that x is a chair)’ (Fine 2009: 158, emphasis in the original).
References
Bohn, E. D. (2012). Monism, emergence, and plural logic. Erkenntnis, 76(2), 211–223.
Fine, K. (2009). The question of ontology. In D. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics (pp. 157–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Connor, T., & Jacobs, J. D. (2003). Emergent individuals. Philosophical Quarterly, 53(213), 540–555.
O’Connor, T., & Wong, H. Y. (2005). The metaphysics of emergence. Noûs, 39(4), 658–678.
Quine, W. V. O. (1948). On what there is. Review of Metaphysics, 2(1), 21–38.
Schaffer, J. (2009). On what grounds what. In D. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics (pp. 347–383). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: the priority of the whole. Philosophical Review, 119(1), 31–76.
Tallant, J. (2013). Problems of parthood for proponents of priority. Analysis, 73(3), 429–438.
van Inwagen, P. (1990). Material beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Williams, J. R. G. (2006). Illusions of gunk. Philosophical Perspectives, 20(1), 493–513.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kitamura, N. Defending Priority Views from the Gunk/Junk Argument. Philosophia 44, 155–165 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9664-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9664-9