Parts, Differences, and Statues
Mercogliano,John Alfred.
2010
- The goal of this paper is to defend the principle of the uniqueness of composition against a potential counter-example. Common sense says that sometimes objects compose another object. For example, molecules of clay, when properly arranged, might compose a statue. Some have claimed further that these molecules of clay can simultaneously compose a statue-shaped lump of clay that occupies the same ... read moreregion of space that the statue occupies but is distinct from it. The lump and the statue are distinct, it is claimed, because they differ in their modal properties. The former could survive radical deformation, but the latter couldn't. I reject this as it implies that these modal properties are emergent. In this paper I propose a novel argument against emergent properties, based on the notion of 'levels of decomposition' and on vagueness and I attempt to explain away the intuition that the lump and the statue differ in their modal properties. This involves building up a general account of de re modal predication according to which objects have their modal properties relative to a sortal, a result of which is that a single object can appear to have different modal properties under different descriptions.read less
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- fj236d63z
- Component ID:
- tufts:UA005.002.023.00001
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