Semiotic Insights: The Data Do the Talking Book

I was only aware of Horgan and Potrc's work because they had an essay in a volume that Lance edited on moral particularism, where they discuss contextualism and metaphysics. H&P endorse what they call "contextualist semantics", which is not spelled out in great detail--they claim that there are parameters that get shifted and so alter what gets expressed by sentences, but that's about as far as the contextualism goes. There is, for example, no discussion of the huge literature on various versions of contextualism, criticisms of contextualism, minimalism, or relativism. The focus of the book is on metaphysics, and it makes oblique contact with the more familiar debates in philosophy of language.

H&P give some well-known arguments against ordinary ontology: van Inwagen's special composition argument (which is a demand for some principled explanation for why certain collections of simple objects make up complex objects, but not other collections, and arguments that no principled explanation is available), an argument more or less from "common sense" that social entities like corporations and battalions don't "really" exist, and an argument that since ontological vagueness is impossible, and ordinary objects are vague, ordinary objects can't exist. They endorse these arguments. That means--hold on to your hat--that they think there aren't tables and chairs and cats and people. That's the austerity in the title of the book. Then there's the part where they (kind of, and, of course, context-sensitively) take it back. They disagree with eliminativists and fictionalists who share the belief that ordinary objects don't exist by insisting that TALK about ordinary objects is literally true. That's the realism in the title of the book. How is that possible, if objects don't exist, and truth is the correspondence of talk and thought with the way the world is? It's possible if you reject, as H&P do, that truth is "direct correspondence" with the way the world is. They replace direct correspondence with "indirect correspondence", which I only have a vague understanding of, though I'm sympathetic to the idea. This is an idea that I think relativists like MacFarlane and Predelli are in one way or another committed to, and that Travis must also endorse in some form or other.

There are various ways to have an austere metaphysics, one that denies that ordinary objects exist. H&P endorse a form of austere metaphysics they call, not being able to resist the pun, "blobjectivism" (other similar puns also feature prominently: "snobjectivism", which is commitment to objects only if they have precise boundaries and principles of composition, and "slobjects" (putative vague objects) (165)). Blobjectivism is the view that there is only one object, the blobject. The blobject is analogous to a lump of jello, which may have different aspects or attributes, but has no parts. Our ordinary talk about objects is made true by the way the blobject is, but not by, say, medium sized objects bearing properties.

I'm not sure quite what to make of all of this, although I'm sympathetic to the idea of indirect correspondence. I think the arguments marshaled against ordinary objects aren't very convincing. And I find appeals to parsimony as reasons for favoring one view over another utterly unmoving. What are we spending? Why is parsimony a virtue? John Haugeland once said that while some people may be fans of desert landscapes, if you grew up in one, you may want a little more variety.