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Mahrad Almotahari, Fixing Reference By Imogen Dickie, Analysis, Volume 77, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 659–662, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anx094
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Extract
I can’t do any better than the author herself: ‘This book is about how we manage to represent ordinary objects in thought and speech’ (1). Ordinary objects ‘are all the things you would name if you were giving a non-philosophical and non-facetious answer to the question of which things there are in a room’ (27). This characterization is further developed over the course of several pages until we arrive at the idea that ordinary things are ‘macroscopic objects having boundaries sufficiently precise and unity relations sufficiently strong to determine an equivalence class of … objects indiscriminable relative to the properties attributed by our ordinary thoughts’ (34). An example may help here.
Consider my dog, Finnegan. He occupies a certain imprecisely bounded region of space. Within this region, there seem to be many distinct composite objects that differ from Finnegan in no way relevant to being a dog – that is, if Finnegan is a dog, so are they. (This is the central claim that generates The Problem of the Many, made famous by Peter Unger. I take it for granted in this context because the author does (31).) These ‘dog-shaped’ and ‘dog-unified arrangements of atoms’, which largely overlap with Finnegan, are called ‘atomic dogs’. ‘Generalizing from the case of the dog, we get the following picture of the relationship between ordinary objects and atomic ordinary objects. It is a contingent fact that an ordinary object’s boundaries … are precise enough to determine a class of atomic ordinary objects which roughly fill them. Every atomic ordinary object is a member of exactly one such class …’ (33). So, anything whose components fail to exhibit enough unity in order to determine a class of ‘atomic objects’ that are indistinguishable by means of unaided observation is not an ordinary object, and thus not the sort of thing whose representation in thought and speech will be explained. This includes clouds, mountains, puffs of smoke, forests, countries, systems of government, and theoretical entities. ‘From this standpoint, the question of [how we manage to represent] non-ordinary things belongs at a later stage of investigation – a stage that will be reached only with the account of ordinary aboutness already in place – so I shall not try to address it here’ (34).