Yesterday I had my first philosophy exam of exam season, Knowledge and Reality. I think it went well! The questions I answered were as generous as they could possibly be: “Are races real? If so, in what sense?”, “Are there any composite objects?”, “Do properties exist, if so what are they?”
For the race question, which is the only topic they have to ask about, I answered that some races are biologically real in a deflationary, non-racialist sense (specifically, the races recognised by the US Office of Management and Budget in 1997), and that some races are biologically unreal (Arab, Hispanic) but are real in the way priesthood or coolness is: namely, as conferred social properties. For the composition question I answered that parthood is fake, and for the the properties question I answered that properties are real because Ostrich nominalists have the property of being absolute corkscrews and that properties are classes of resembling particulars.
Two hours prior, when the revision really begins, I was going over the reading for a topic I didn’t end up writing about in much detail: the problem of material constitution. Imagine a lump of clay, Lumpl, that gets moulded into an impressive looking statue of your mother, Statue.
On the one hand, it looks like there now have to be two perfectly co-located objects, Statue and Lumpl, since the clay and the statue have different properties (e.g., one can survive squashing, one is aesthetically valuable, one was mined from the earth, etc.) and if two objects have different properties, they can’t be the same object. Yet the clay wasn’t destroyed when it was moulded into the statue, right? So if the statue and the clay both exist still, it looks like they have to be co-located.
On the other hand, it’s weird to say that there are two perfectly co-located objects, and — more substantively — it’s puzzling what could possibly ground the difference between them, given that they share 100% of their material and spatial parts.
In “Toward a Conceptualist Solution to the Grounding Problem”, Iris Einheuser tries to solve this puzzle as follows: the reason Statue and Lumpl have different modal properties (e.g., one can survive squashing while the other can’t) is that the modal profiles of objects are given to them by our concepts. I have the following concept: STATUE. Built into that concept is the idea that statues can’t survive squashing. I have a separate concept: LUMP OF CLAY. Build into that concept is the idea that lumps of clay can survive squashing.
On Einheuser’s view, the world is full of stuff, but that stuff has no in-build persistence criteria: whether a parcel of stuff can survive squashing is question the world is, in itself, silent about. But — enter conceptualism — our concepts build persistence criteria in to objects, which they wouldn’t have had without said concepts. What grounds the fact that Statue and Lumpl have different modal properties is prior facts about our concepts, STATUE and LUMP OF CLAY. Thus, we can explain why Statue and Lumpl have different modal properties, despite sharing all of their spatial and material parts.
Just before the exam, I realised (or, less factively, came to believe) that the conceptualist solution is cooked if you’re a physicalist who thinks concepts are mental entities. For fear of spreading philosophical misinformation, and because I might publish this if I decide it’s not confused, my argument for this is locked behind the paywall of Awol. To sweeten the pot, I am also including the full reading list I was set for metaphysics. It covers possible worlds, temporal parts, universals, the flow of time, material constitution, and the metaphysics of race…
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