There are no such things as tables, only “particles arranged tablewise.” Or so say certain contemporary metaphysicians, who in the name of science deny the existence of the ordinary objects of our experience. In her book Ordinary Objects, philosopher Amie Thomasson rebuts such arguments. (Her work is part of a recent salutary trend, which includes Crawford Elder’s Familiar Objects and their Shadows and Kathrin Koslicki’s The Structure of Objects.) Thomasson is interviewed over at 3:AM Magazine.
A couple of passages from the interview deserve special comment. Thomasson says:
[T]he arguments for the existence of ordinary objects (and many other things) are very easy. The hard part is defending that ‘easy’ methodology… and showing where the eliminativists’ arguments go wrong…
These include arguments that ordinary objects would be causally redundant, would violate metaphysical principles against co-location (for example), or would run into trouble with Sorites arguments (given the vagueness of the concepts involved). They also include arguments that accepting such objects would run afoul of the demand for parsimony, the need to accept a scientific ontology, or the demand to find a clear and consistent answer to the special composition question.
End quote. This is an extremely important point that applies to areas far beyond the one Thomasson is addressing -- to ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, you name it. The arguments for common sense views in all these areas -- for the existence of God and for traditional sexual morality, for example -- are in themselves not all that difficult to see. (I hasten to add that as far as I know Thomasson herself would not necessarily agree with me about those two particular examples.) What is difficult is clearing away all the dust that has been kicked up by several centuries of bad metaphysics and epistemology (rationalist, empiricist, Kantian, etc.), which keeps people from understanding the arguments and seeing their power.
Though in some respects Thomasson’s views are the sort any Aristotelian or Thomist would find congenial, in other ways her approach seems too beholden to the modern, post-Cartesian assumptions we philosophically reactionary types think need to be overcome. She says:
I think of metaphysics as capable of doing conceptual work (and generally undertaking this in the object language): work in determining the relations among our concepts, what follows from them, detecting problems or inconsistencies, and perhaps also (as Carnap would have had it) in conceptual engineering—building new conceptual systems as needed to serve different purposes. But I don’t think of metaphysics as properly engaged in quasi-scientific work of discovering what ‘really’ exists or what the ‘real’ natures of things are.
The trouble with this, in my view, is that it seems to buy into the standard contemporary assumption that if you aren’t doing “empirical science” then the only thing left for you to be doing is “conceptual analysis,” and that that is what metaphysics consists in. But for the Scholastic, that is a false choice, born of the desiccated conceptual landscape we’ve inherited from the rationalists and empiricists. For the Scholastic, metaphysics does in fact give us knowledge of real things and their essences -- and not just of our concepts of things -- and knowledge that goes beyond what modern empirical science tells us (even if, where it concerns material substances, it must be supplemented by what empirical science tells us). I have addressed these issues in earlier posts (e.g. hereand here).