Nominalism

This chapter is a critical discussion of nominalist accounts of the ontology of the basic properties and relations present in our experience. Predicate nominalism, concept nominalism, class nominalism, resemblance nominalism, and trope theory are discussed. Several novel objections to forms of nominalism and trope theory, in other words to accounts of properties that deny they are universals, are developed. These include a series of objections that such accounts are not able to plausibly account for the essential features of specific basic properties that appear in our experience, such as colors, in other words that they misrepresent the modal structure of those properties.

Modal Structuralism and Color

It is like something to have sensory experiences, and differences in this what-it’s-like, in this phenomenal consciousness, are called differences in “qualia.” Exploration of the modal structure of the superworld in earlier chapters is necessary groundwork for a plausible and novel account of how our neurophysiology is sufficient to account for the kinds of nonveridical qualia involved in our sensory experience, a physicalist account of at least the basic features of the naïve experience explored in this book. That is the focus of this chapter. Its core idea is that the apparent modal structure of such qualia as those involved in our experience is due to the actual modal structure of the neurophysiology that constitutes that experience. This chapter develops an initial sketch of this idea by treating the case of color. The robustly metaphysical modal structure apparently present in our experience of color is in fact a reflection of the much more mundane difference between activated and merely potentiated features of our neurophysiology.

Haecceities

This chapter is an account of the particularity of ordinary concrete objects like balls and bikes that appear within our experience. It argues that certain sorts of haecceities, which is to say irreducible individualities or bare particularities, are required to account for the particularity of such things. These haecceities involve modal structure of a distinctive sort. Various accounts are explored. But the central model developed involves haecceities of minimal spatial and temporal material bits, which help in turn to constitute the present time slice of a perceived object. This time slice could occur at different times or in different possible worlds, and instantiates a substantial form that constrains, in a perdurantist manner, available forms of identity over time rooted in concrete relations.

Space, Time, and Location

This chapter is an account of the particularity of spatial and temporal regions as they appear within our experience. It argues that the spatial and temporal relations of these regions are sufficient to individuate them, despite standard objections. This involves a kind of moderate substantivalism about space. The chapter also explores some of the complex modal structure of the spatial relations in question, relevant for instance to geometric truth and the way in which things seem to reverse in mirrors. The eternalist view of time presumed by this account is defended against alternative conceptions of time such as presentism and the moving spotlight theory.

Introduction

This is an introductory chapter. It sketches the project of the book, which is to understand the ontology of a central class of particulars, and of their most basic and central properties and relations. This central class encompasses the commonsense entities that our experience seems naïvely to reveal. First of all, there are ordinary visible objects like balls and cars. The book investigates the kind of particularity they present in experience. Second, there are locations in space and time that such ordinary things occupy, and which have a somewhat different sort of particularity. Third, there are the material bits that make up the balls and cars. The proper understanding of both the particularity and the concrete properties and relations of ordinary concrete objects like these demands certain metaphysical novelties. It requires a return to the ancient conception that there is a difference between different ways of being, specifically between the existence of actual tables and chairs with their evident colors and shapes on one hand, and what might be called “the subsistence” of certain merely possible beings on the other. But it also requires the recognition of various sorts of unity relations less than strict identity, which for instance relate determinable and relevantly determinate properties. All these novelties involve distinctive forms of modal structure.

Universals

Immanent realism is the view that some fundamental properties are immanent universals, entities that can exist wholly in different places at the same time that yet only exist when instanced. This chapter develops the proper immanent realist account of the basic properties and relations that appear in our experience. It includes a new understanding of the relation between determinate and determinable universals. Another novelty involves determinable structural universals constituting one fundamental substantial form of ordinary concrete particulars. Various other complexities of modal structure are developed. Cases discussed include phenomenal color, other sensory properties, spatial and temporal relations, causal powers, and substantial forms. Some affinities but also differences with transcendental realism are considered.

Modal Structure

This chapter develops an account of modal structure. Modal structure is the way in which various basic elements of reality, say properties and particularities, involve modality, which is to say possibility and necessity, in their essence. The specific form of modal structure involved in the cases this book considers is that of “the superworld.” It involves a local entwining in being of the merely possible and the actual. For instance, a specific shade of scarlet is entwined in being with the real possibility of other specific hues to which it bears essential relations of similarity. This view of the truth grounds of certain modal claims is motivated by a critical examination of extant views. For instance, there is a revealing analogy between time and modality, which undercuts standing views of mere possibilia. Presentism, the view that facts about the past are constituted by various facts now, can be legitimately accused of changing the subject, of not really providing an account of what is truly past, but rather talking about something else. So too standing views of possibilia. Possibilism, which identifies possibilities with existing things spatially disconnected to us, and actualism, which identifies possible concrete objects with various existing abstracta, also improperly change the subject, and so fail as accounts of what is truly merely possible. Rather, a genuinely different type of being is possessed by certain possibilia, which I call mere “subsistence.” This is a variation of some classical metaphysical views, for instance Aristotle’s notion of focal being.

Problems of Individuation

This chapter is an introduction to problems regarding the individuation of the ordinary concrete particulars of our experience. There are three problems of unity. These are what makes up the unity of the parts of a single particular at a time, what makes for the unity of a particular over time despite change, and what makes for its identity across possible worlds. There are also corresponding problems of difference, regarding what makes two otherwise identical particulars distinct. This chapter explore serious difficulties—especially modal difficulties—that arise when we place standing solutions to these problems in juxtaposition.