I’m trying to write my Problem of the Many
paper for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy and, well, it’s going slowly. But here are some thoughts on
unrelated points.

The Encyclopaedia is much more widely circulated
than I realised. In the last five weeks my article on intrinsic
properties was viewed 730 times. This is more often than any of my papers
on my website would be viewed in a year. I should take a little care with which
jokes I allow into the paper…

Frank Artzenius’s and Tim Maudlin’s paper on
time travel
looks very good, at least to a scientifically illiterate person like me.

I’ve been learning a lot from paying closer
attention to Hud Hudson’s book
on the Problem of the Many and related issues to do with the metaphysics of
humans. Hud takes seriously the option that there really are millions of people
everywhere where we think there is just one. He refers to these people as
‘brothers’, at least when they are all male. At first this sounds like the
right thing to say, because they each have the same parents. But on reflection,
maybe it isn’t right. Maybe each of the people sitting in this chair has a
different mother and father from each of the others. As long as we apply the
‘there are lots more people than you think there are’ solution across the
board, we know there are enough possible parents around for this to be true.
And saying this makes some intuitively true claims, like “I have two brothers” true,
which should count as a reason to believe it to be true.

Hud also mentions, as an ‘argument’, that if
this ‘solution’ to the Problem of the Many is true, it will be impossible to
live up to vows of monogamy. But of course this isn’t right. It will be hard to
produce any more children while living up to vows of monogamy. But given how
overpopulated the world is – we thought things were bad with 6 billion people,
and now we find out there are 10³⁷ people – that’s probably a good
thing.

Tentatively, I plan to set up the puzzle by
noting that there are good reasons to believe each of the following eight
claims, but they are inconsistent. In what follows, F is any regular
sortal predicate.

0        There
are some xs and some ys such that at least one of the xs
is not one of the ys, or vice versa, and we cannot tell whether the xs
form an F, and we cannot tell whether the ys form an F.

1        There is an F

2        There is at most one F

3        There are objects o₁
and o₂ such that the xs compose o₁
and the ys compose o₂

4        If one of the xs is not among the
ys, or vice versa, then o₁ is not identical with o₂

5        If o₁ is an F,
and o₂ is an F, and o₁ is not
identical with o₂, then there are two Fs

6        If the xs compose an F,
then the ys compose an F

7        Any
F is composed of at some atoms

I’m
being a bit lazy with the formalism here, because I’ve used variables in later
sentences that are bound by earlier sentences. I think this is easy enough to
understand, so I’m tempted to leave it like that. And in his (very good) Blackwell/Brown
lectures, Kit
Fine argued that this kind of thing was perfectly acceptable anyway for
deep theoretical reasons. It seems to me that all of the solutions are denials
of one of 1 through 7, and rarely do distinct solutions deny the same premise.
The only exceptions might be that supervaluationist and epistemicist solutions
both deny 6, but we’d expect them in this case to agree on more or less where
the flaw lies, and a few non-Leibnizian solutions deny 4, but it’d be painful
to set up the argument so every one of them denied a different premise.

I’m trying to write my Problem of the Many
paper for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy and, well, it’s going slowly. But here are some thoughts on
unrelated points.

The Encyclopaedia is much more widely circulated
than I realised. In the last five weeks my article on intrinsic
properties was viewed 730 times. This is more often than any of my papers
on my website would be viewed in a year. I should take a little care with which
jokes I allow into the paper…

Frank Artzenius’s and Tim Maudlin’s paper on
time travel
looks very good, at least to a scientifically illiterate person like me.

I’ve been learning a lot from paying closer
attention to Hud Hudson’s book
on the Problem of the Many and related issues to do with the metaphysics of
humans. Hud takes seriously the option that there really are millions of people
everywhere where we think there is just one. He refers to these people as
‘brothers’, at least when they are all male. At first this sounds like the
right thing to say, because they each have the same parents. But on reflection,
maybe it isn’t right. Maybe each of the people sitting in this chair has a
different mother and father from each of the others. As long as we apply the
‘there are lots more people than you think there are’ solution across the
board, we know there are enough possible parents around for this to be true.
And saying this makes some intuitively true claims, like “I have two brothers” true,
which should count as a reason to believe it to be true.

Hud also mentions, as an ‘argument’, that if
this ‘solution’ to the Problem of the Many is true, it will be impossible to
live up to vows of monogamy. But of course this isn’t right. It will be hard to
produce any more children while living up to vows of monogamy. But given how
overpopulated the world is – we thought things were bad with 6 billion people,
and now we find out there are 10³⁷ people – that’s probably a good
thing.

Tentatively, I plan to set up the puzzle by
noting that there are good reasons to believe each of the following eight
claims, but they are inconsistent. In what follows, F is any regular
sortal predicate.

0        There
are some xs and some ys such that at least one of the xs
is not one of the ys, or vice versa, and we cannot tell whether the xs
form an F, and we cannot tell whether the ys form an F.

1        There is an F

2        There is at most one F

3        There are objects o₁
and o₂ such that the xs compose o₁
and the ys compose o₂

4        If one of the xs is not among the
ys, or vice versa, then o₁ is not identical with o₂

5        If o₁ is an F,
and o₂ is an F, and o₁ is not
identical with o₂, then there are two Fs

6        If the xs compose an F,
then the ys compose an F

7        Any
F is composed of at some atoms

I’m
being a bit lazy with the formalism here, because I’ve used variables in later
sentences that are bound by earlier sentences. I think this is easy enough to
understand, so I’m tempted to leave it like that. And in his (very good) Blackwell/Brown
lectures, Kit
Fine argued that this kind of thing was perfectly acceptable anyway for
deep theoretical reasons. It seems to me that all of the solutions are denials
of one of 1 through 7, and rarely do distinct solutions deny the same premise.
The only exceptions might be that supervaluationist and epistemicist solutions
both deny 6, but we’d expect them in this case to agree on more or less where
the flaw lies, and a few non-Leibnizian solutions deny 4, but it’d be painful
to set up the argument so every one of them denied a different premise.