Abstract
In this paper I argue that the theory that holes are immaterial objects faces an objection that has traditionally been thought to be the principal difficulty with its main rival, which construes holes as material parts of material objects. Consequently, one of the principal advantages of identifying holes with immaterial objects is illusory: its apparent ease of accounting for truths about number of holes. I argue that in spite of this we should not think of holes as material parts of material objects. This is because the theory that holes are properties does not face the same difficulties as either of these theories that construe holes as objects of some sort.
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Notes
There are other accounts of holes that are on the market, including the idea that holes are conventional entities (Miller 2007) or products of our inability to paraphrase talk about holes (McDaniel 2010). However, my concern here is principally to address realist conceptions of holes, which these accounts do not offer. My reason for this is simply a methodological one: that our common-sense conception of holes is realist and that such views should be preferred unless shown to be fatally flawed. An alternative realist account to Casati and Varzi’s is offered by Wake et al. (2007) according to which holes are regions of spacetime. However, the objection in this paper will apply to that position as well, for the general reasons set out in Sect. 5.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection.
It should be made clear, though, that Casati and Varzi themselves do not employ their account of perfect fillers to deal with the counting problem I’ve identified here. It is at least logically possible that a reply to the counting problem could be independent of an account of our intuitions about which of the regions of space marked out in Fig. 1 is coextensive with the hole.
References
Casati, R., & Varzi, A. (1995). Holes and other superficialities. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lewis, D., & Lewis, S. (1970). Holes. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 48(2), 206–212.
McDaniel, K. (2010). Being and almost nothingness. Noûs, 44(4), 628–649.
Meadows, P. J. (2013). What angles can tell us about what holes are not. Erkenntnis, 78(2), 319–331.
Miller, K. (2007). Immaterial beings. The Monist, 90(3), 349–371.
Wake, A., Spencer, J., & Fowler, J. (2007). Holes as regions of spacetime. The Monist, 90(3), 372–378.
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Meadows, P.J. Holes Cannot Be Counted as Immaterial Objects. Erkenn 80, 841–852 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9676-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9676-z