Is the Hirsch–Sider Dispute Merely Verbal?

Abstract

There is currently debate between deflationists and anti-deflationists about the ontology of persisting objects. Some deflationists think that disputes between, for example, four-dimensionalists (e.g. Ted Sider and David Lewis) and quasi-nihilists (e.g. Peter Van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks) are merely verbal disputes. Anti-deflationists deny this. Eli Hirsch is a deflationist who maintains that many ontological disputes are merely verbal. Theodore Sider maintains that the disputes are not merely verbal. Hirsch and Sider are thus engaged in a metaontological dispute. In this paper, I argue that Hirsch's metaontological dispute with Sider is, by Hirsch's own lights, itself merely verbal. I conclude that the mere verbalness of his metaontological dispute with Sider suggests that Hirsch's account of what makes a dispute merely verbal may be problematic.

Notes

¹This is a modified version of an example from Hirsch [2005: 69].

²Hirsch has forcefully argued that many of the disputes in the literature on material object ontology are merely verbal [2002; 2005; 2007; 2009].

³McA and McB might disagree over the truth of a number of sentences without thereby having disputes, for these sentences might never come up in conversation.

⁴Hirsch [2005: 69] cites Burge [1979] in this connection.

⁵It is not clear that Burge's view would imply that McA and McB mean the same by their uses of ‘cup’ and ‘glass’. Hirsch is aware of this, saying ‘… I'm not entirely confident that [Burge's view] applies to the trivial example of the glass and cup’[2005: 69]. I shall ignore this complexity here.

⁶More carefully, the dispute is verbal just in case the most charitable interpretation of A-lish is one where sentences of A-lish that are orthographically or phonetically identical to McA's disputed sentences come out true and vice versa.

⁷This formulation is somewhat fast and loose; rather, each party will agree that speakers of the imagined public language corresponding to the other's position speak the truth.

⁸Each principle should be read as having an implicit ceteris paribus clause.

⁹This is admittedly very vague. Part of the difficulty, I maintain, in the dispute over whether Quantifier Variance is true derives from the lack of any widely accepted statement of it.

¹⁰It might be argued that Hirsch should reject the notion of a logical kind as unintelligible. I would say rather that the concept is, to date, under-described and under-motivated. In his 2008, Hirsch claims that disputes about logical kinds are related to, and as merely verbal as, the ontologists' disputes about existence. In the light of this claim, I see no reason why the Hirschese could not interpret the Siderish in terms of the notion of a logical kind. Thanks to Eli Hirsch here.

¹¹In my above conciliatory interpretations, I have assumed that, if there are logical kinds, there is only one joint-carving, EXISTENCE-like logical kind. This assumption might be rejected, however. Those who reject this assumption may read ‘if there are logical kinds’ as ‘if there is a unique EXISTENCE-like logical kind’ throughout.

¹²Thanks to Eli Hirsch and an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

¹³Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

¹⁴Thanks to the same referee here.

¹⁵Thanks to Eli Hirsch here.

¹⁶For comments on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to John Devlin, Eli Hirsch, Ted Sider, Angel Pinillos, Richard Creath, Michelle Saint, Michael Gifford, and two excellent referees for the AJP.