Real Natures and Familiar
Objects is an important, but very difficult book. While it will doubtless
become required reading for professional metaphysicians and their upper-level
students, I doubt that non-philosophers will get much from it.

Crawford Elder’s aim is to defend the ontology of
commonsense: He thinks that the world includes many different kinds of objects.
Some are tiny, such as molecules and electrons. Some are bigger, such as cats,
tables, and sealing wax. Amongst the most interesting are human beings. These
things really exist in the world, independently of human interests. What’s
more, they have "essential properties" – while objects can change in
many ways, they also have certain properties such that if these properties are
lost the object ceases to exist. So, while if French polish is applied to a
table it remains a table, it ceases to be a table when put through a wood
shredder.

While such claims may be in line
with commonsense, Elder’s theses will seem controversial to many
metaphysicians. Within recent metaphysics there has been a tendency for people
to consider medium-sized commonsense objects with suspicion. This suspicion has
had two main grounds. To some medium-sized objects seem suspect because of
"causal exclusion" arguments. For others the fundamental worry has
been that medium-sized objects seem vague.

Causal exclusion arguments go
something like this: A billiard ball just is a group of molecules. Thus, if
someone throws the ball at my head, when it hits me, I am hit by the ball and I
am also thereby hit by a collection of fundamental particles. What then causes
my pain? Well, a complete causal story can be given in terms of the collection
of particles that has been flying through the air hitting the particles that
make up me. Everything can be explained at the basic physical level. As a
consequence it has seemed to many that there is no additional work for the billiard
ball to do, and that parsimony thus dictates that such medium sized objects can
be eliminated from a serious metaphysics. If everything that happens in the
world can be explained in terms of fundamental particles interacting then at
the end of the day the only things that really exist are fundamental particles.

Worries that stem from vagueness
are somewhat different. Many metaphysicians think that respectable entities
should have clear-cut identity conditions. That is, if one is talking about
proper entities one should be able to count how many of them one has. Thus
electrons count as proper entities €“ if you have one entity with the mass and
charge of an electron then you’ve got one electron. Other putative objects fair
less well. In the case of clouds, for example, it is often unclear whether one
has one, two, or three of them. Thus, electrons count as kosher entities, while
clouds do not. Medium-sized objects characteristically fail to have clear-cut
identity conditions because they fall into problems with vagueness. Consider a
book for example: If you take your book and rip out one page you still have a
book. If you rip out two, or three, or ten pages, you still have a book. In
fact, however many pages are left, taking out one more isn’t going to make any
differences. On the other hand, if you take out too many pages, so you end up
with none at all, then the book has been destroyed. It’s not at all clear when
the book ceased to exist, however. This is the problem of vagueness. It implies
that medium-sized objects don’t have clear-cut identity conditions, and, thus,
many metaphysicians will say, are only dubious objects.

Elder seeks to defend medium-sized
objects from such objections. His arguments against causal exclusion arguments
are detailed and convincing. His arguments against the problems posed by
vagueness are sketchier. Against causal exclusion arguments, Elder seeks to
show that statements such as "Max was hit by the ball" cannot be
satisfactorily paraphrased by statements of the form "The ball collection
of molecules hit the Max collection of molecules". Elder argues that this
is because there is no way of picking out the molecules that make up
medium-sized objects without referring to those objects.  Thus medium-sized
objects have work to do in a respectable metaphysics and cannot just be
eliminated. Elder also thinks that medium-sized objects can be defended against
the problems posed by vagueness. He suggests that a degrees of truth approach
should be adopted €“ although such an option is not discussed in detail.

Having defended the claim that at
least some medium-sized objects should be admitted into a serious metaphysics,
Elder goes into some details. He argues that at least some artifacts really
exist. As well as believing in the wood that makes up your desk, you should
also accept that the desk exists too.  Readers uncorrupted by too much
metaphysics will probably never have doubted the existence of their furniture
in any case. The point of Elder’s book really is to show that commonsense was
right all along, and "serious metaphysics" confused €“ which is
another reason why this book will only really be of interest to metaphysicians.

© 2004 Rachel
Cooper

Rachel
Cooper, Ph.D., Lecturer in Philosophy, Institute for Environment, Philosophy
and Public Policy, Furness College, Lancaster
University, UK

Categories: Philosophical