Journal of Philosophical Research

Volume 33, 2008

Patrick Toner
Pages 293-297

On Merricks’s Dictum

Consider the claim that if there were macrophysical objects, they would cause things. Trenton Merricks takes this to be an obviously true claim, and he puts it to work in his argument for eliminating some (alleged) macrophysical objects. In this short paper, I argue that the claim in question—Merricks’s Dictum—is not obviously true, and may even be false.