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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2008

Leibniz's Law, Coincident Entities, and Question-Begging Predicates

Résumé

Meta-ontology (in van Inwagen's [1998] influential sense) concerns, among other things, the methodology of ontology, and a very controversial meta-ontological issue is to what extent ontology can rely on semantic analysis in the business of establishing the furniture of the world. In this talk we discuss an argument advanced by some ontologists (we call them Monists) against supporters of sortal concepts and/or coincident entities (we call them Pluralists), and its meta-ontological import. Pluralist resort to the contraposed Leibniz's Law, in an allegedly non-opaque context, to establish that spatiotemporally coincident entities a and b (typically, of different sorts - say, a statue and the piece of clay it is made of) are distinct, by pointing at a (usually, but not necessarily, modal) predicate F( ) which is made true by a and false by b, or vice versa (Johnston [1992], Baker [1997], Thomson [1998], Wiggins [2001], Fine [2003]). Monists try to put Pluralists in front of a dilemma: in attempting to introduce metaphysical differences on the basis of semantic distinctions, Pluralists either (a) rest on a fallacy of verbalism, entailed by a trade-off between a de dicto and a de re reading of modal claims in the argument to the effect that two objects of different sorts can co-occupy the same spatiotemporal region, or (b) beg the question against Monism, by having to assume beforehand the distinction between a and b, which was supposed to be established by the argument (Della Rocca [1996], Varzi [2000] and [2002]). We aim at raising a tu quoque against Monists, showing that the dilemma can be reproduced against them: they cannot even distinguish material objects (or events) from the spatiotemporal regions they occupy, unless they also resort to linguistic distinctions. This is achieved by showing that both philosophical contenders face the problem of finding, in Della Rocca's jargon, "non-question-begging predicates": predicates that can be used to apply Leibniz's Law non-circularly in order to establish ontological distinctions. Such problem can also affect predicates expressing properties of events or spatiotemporal features of material beings. Therefore, the Unifiers' methodological purpose to emancipate themselves from semantic analysis in ontological businesses is to a large extent a chimera. On the positive side, we argue that the boundary between question-begging and non-question-begging contexts F( ) - therefore, between question-begging and non-question-begging applications of Leibniz's Law in order to ascertain differences in the World Out There - can be traced via a holistic set of criteria involving both reference to semantic intuitions and general metaphysical options concerning material objects, events, and the like. From the meta-ontological point of view Monists and Pluralists appear to be on the very same boat: neither is allowed to take metaphysical claims as straightforwardly entailed by our cognitive representation of the world, or by the way such a representation is mirrored in the functioning of our language; but both have to begin their metaphysical task with linguistic intuitions, for this is how the world is given to us: via our cognitive apparatus and the language we use to speak about it.

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halshs-00791676, version 1 (21-02-2013)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00791676 , version 1

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Francesco Berto. Leibniz's Law, Coincident Entities, and Question-Begging Predicates. ECAP 6: Sixth European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Aug 2008, Krakow, Poland. ⟨halshs-00791676⟩
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