Real Tables

REAL TABLES* Three Philosophical Temperaments^ Tables exist. You can buy tables in the local furniture mart or on the Intemet; you can give your sister a table as a present; you can use a table as a weapon to fend off a prowler. The philosophical question, if there is one, is not whether tables exist but what makes it the case that tables exist. Not all philosophers would agree. To some, tables are suspect entities; if tables exist at all, which is unlikely, they do so in some attenuated sense. This conclusion is taken to follow from an analysis of the table concept together with a few uncontroversial assumptions about the material world. Examination of the table concept reveals that tables, if they exist, must have a certain character. But there are good empirical reasons to doubt that anything with this character does in fact exist. So there are good reasons to think that tables do not exist. Or, if this sounds a bit over the top, "strictly speaking" there are no tables, although we could have excellent prudential reasons to continue talking as though there were. Non-philosophers are inclined to regard reasoning of this kind as confirming their worst suspicions about philosophy. It is one thing to prove the non-existence of shadowy entities: auras, or the Loch Ness Monster, or the General Will. It is another matter altogether to contend that ordinary merchandise does not exist. A more charitable thought is that debates over the existence of ordinary objects reveal distinct philosophical temperaments. One kind of philosopher, for instance, might find it natural to reason as follows: 'Table' is a sortal term: tables are countable, persisting continuants. Tables are substances, not modes or universals. Tables are table-shaped, but being a table is not just being table-shaped. That out of the way, we are in a position to ask whether tables exist. It would seem they do only if something in the world answers to the table "Real Tables" by John Heil, The Monist, vol. 88, no. 4, pp. 493-509. Copyright © 2005, THE MONIST, Peru, Illinois 61354.

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concept. This might appear unlikely. When we look closely at tables, we discover that they comprise swarms of micro-particles. Particles in these swarms come and go. There is no prospect of identifying tables with collections of their micro-constituents. This table could have existed, even if these particles had not existed. And the particles can exist without the table's existing: if you set the table on fire, you destroy the table, but not the particles. Perhaps the table is an arrangement of particles. But in that case, the table is not a continuant, not a substance, but a mode or an instance of a universal. This is what Locke took himself to have discovered about ordinary objects: tables, trees, rocks, human bodies turn out to be modes, not substances. A tree is not a substance, but a way substances (the corpuscles) are organized over time. Locke, a sensible fellow, was not moved by this "discovery" to announce that trees, tables, rocks, and the like do not exist. Rather, Locke took himself to have uncovered a deep truth about such things: what we might pre-theoretically have thought were substances are in fact modes. Locke represents one kind of philosophical temperament. Another very different sort of temperament is exemplified by philosophers who, beginning with observations resembling Locke's, conclude that tables, clouds, boulders, planets do not in fact exist. Not just anything could count as a table. Analysis of the table concept reveals that tables must satisfy certain standards. Nothing in the material world satisfies those standards, however. If Locke discovered anything, he discovered that tables do not exist. A third temperament deserves mention. This is the temperament manifested by philosophers who accept the arguments of eliminativistminded philosophers, but refuse to draw the eliminativist conclusion. Instead, they insist that tables, clouds, boulders, planets enjoy something like a Moorean status: our confidence that such things exist far exceeds our confidence that eliminativist arguments prove what they appear to prove. If those arguments show anything, they show only that tables, clouds, boulders, planets are not "reducible to" collections of particles, even structured collections. What follows is not that tables, clouds, boulders, planets, and the like are non-existent, but that such things are 'higher-level" entities: entities that exist somehow in addition to the collections of particles that might, at any given time, make them up.

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Philosophers of this third persuasion are nowadays likely to appeal to supervenience: "higher-level" objects or properties that supervene on, but are not reducible to "lower-level" objects or properties. Perhaps "higherlevel" items are "realized" by "lower-level" entities. This looks promising. Tables exist, all right. Tables are entities perfectly satisfying the table concept. But tables are "higher-level" entities "realized" by the particles. Tables are nothing special in this regard. Familiar objects quite generally, and indeed most of the objects figuring in theses promoted in the special sciences, will tum out, on examination, to be "higher-level" objects. Table Talk We have in front of us—on the table, so to speak—three attitudes toward tables: (1) tables exist, but are not what we might have supposed they were; (2) tables do not exist, or do not strictly exist; (3) tables exist and are pretty much as we thought they were (how could they be anything else!) although they exist as "higher-level" entities. The latter two attitudes are apparently grounded in a certain view of language and thought. The idea is roughly this, if you want to know what tables are, you must begin with an accounting of the table concept. A grasp of the table concept includes a grasp of truth-conditions for the application of the table predicate, 'is a table'. These are available to any competent speaker, although untrained informants might find it difficult to articulate what they know when they know what a table is. In the simplest case we can say (a) 'This is a table' is true just in case this is a table. Trained informants—philosophers—can provide a few more details. 'Table' is a sortal term. To grasp the table concept is to grasp both conditions of application (manifested in your being able to tell tables from chairs) and a grasp of identity conditions (manifested in your being able to count and re-identify tables). This means that tables, whatever else they might be, are substantial entities. We can distinguish substantial entities from dependent, non-substantial entities. Consider the table's squareness or its whiteness. These are properties or modes of the table. The table could exist without being

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white or square, but the table's whiteness and squareness could not exist without the table. We can say with confidence that tables are substances, not properties, things, not ways things are. We can say this without embracing any particular ontological view as to the nature of substance or properties, indeed without committing ourselves to very much at all. Talk of properties, for instance, could turn out to be a veiled way of talking of objects' characteristics, or even talk of classes. We have then the idea that the ontology of tables can be "read off' the table concept (or the table concept suitably analyzed). All that remains is to look and see whether anything in the world answers to this concept: are there substances possessing properties we associate with tables? We could start with a close examination of this table. The table looks solid, but we know that this is only how it looks. What we take to be a solid surface is in reality a bustling swarm of panicles. Might the table just be this swarm of particles? Why not? The swarm of particles, after all, occupies the very region of space we take the table to occupy. When you point to the table or move it across the room, you point to or move a swarm of particles. The simple idea that the table is the swarm of particles can be easily derailed, however. For starters, tables and swarms have different identity conditions. Tables can gain or lose parts and undergo all sorts of compositional change while retaining their identity. Not so for swarms. The identity of a swarm depends on the identity of its constituents. If A and B are swarms, then A is B just in case A and B have the same constituents. If you replace one of the table's legs, the table survives, but the swarm does not. Similarly, if you run the table through a scrounger and reduce it to a cube of compressed sawdust, you have destroyed the table, but not the swarm. Objects' identities are governed by Leibniz's Law: if A is B, then, of necessity, every property of A is a property of B and vice versa. But the table has properties the swarm lacks, the swarm properties missing from the table. The swarm, but not the table, has the property of coming into being on Tuesday and the property of being capable of being reshaped into a sphere or a cube. The table, but not the swarm, has the property of coming into being on Wednesday and the property of being such that it could not be reshaped into a sphere or a cube. These properties, "historical properties" and "modal properties," oblige us to distinguish the table and the swarm and encourage us to regard the table and the swarm as occupying, at least for a time, the same spatial region.

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This implies that distinct things can be in the same place at once. How is this possible? Locke argues, eind many philosophers agree, that objects of the same kind could not be co-located. This leaves open the possibility of objects of different kinds being co-locatable. Two tables cannot occupy the same region of space at the same time, but a table and a swarm could. It will follow that every complex object is co-located with an aggregate consisting of its parts. The object and the aggregate must be counted different objects because they differ in their modal properties, and, typically anyway, in their historical properties as well. This looks like an important discovery: the universe contains more than we might otherwise have thought. What would we do without the philosophers.' You could resist these arguments. When we looked closely at the table, we observed a swarm. The swarm has impressive credentials: it is recognized in physics. Our best science tells us that the swarm exists, behaves in particular ways, and falls under strict laws of nature. The table's standing is less impressive. Physics includes no mention of tables. Whenever we look closely at a table, it seems to dissolve, turning into a swarm. The behavior of tables, their physical characteristics, and their capacities for interaction with other objects are all explicable—at least 'in principle"—by reference to features of swarms. The table is starting to look iffy. Considerations that led us to distinguish the table and the swarm cut both ways. We need the swarm in any case. What, other than sentimentality, a soft spot in our hearts for tables, could lead us to imagine that tables, as well as swarms, exist? Anyway, given the swarms, why should we care about tables? If swarms are good enough for physicists, they should be good enough for philosophers.^ We are left, it seems, with a choice. We could keep the tables, but only at the cost of adding them to the world we know about from physics. Or we could abandon the tables, at least officially, while keeping up the pretense that they exist for everyday purposes. In that case, we philosophers would know something non-philosophers did not know: tables are like sunrises; talk of either expresses a harmless fiction. This drama plays out in a famous passage in the preface of Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World. As he sits down to write, Eddington draws up, as he puts it, "my chairs to my two tables." "There are," he says, "duplicates of every object about me—two tables, two chairs, two pens." Consider the two tables:

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Eddington is moved by these reflections to notice the evident gulf between ordinary objects and their scientific counterparts. It makes all the difference in the world whether the paper before me is poised as it were on a swarm of flies and sustained in shuttlecock fashion by a series of tiny blows from the swarm underneath, or whether it is supported because there is substance below it, it being the intrinsic nature of substance to occupy space to the exclusion of other substance. (Eddington 1928, xii)

Eddington concludes that "modem physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there." (Eddington 1928, xii). Science speaks: embracing physics means accepting that tables are illusions. Nothing in the material world answers to our table concept, insofar as that concept is of objects possessing a substantial constitution. All that exists—all that really exists—are swarms of electrons and other particles or whatever it is that physicists tell us constitutes the fine grain of reality. "Higher-Level" Objects We face a choice. (1) We can follow Eddington and give up the tables; or (2) we can keep the tables as additions of being, items existing in addition to, "over and above," the particles. Another apparent possibility, the possibility that tables could be "reduced to" the particles, looks like a non-starter.

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If we go with (2), thereby populating the world with objects not countenanced by physics, are we, foolishly it would seem, setting ourselves up against science? Maybe not. Why should we imagine that physics is the measure of all things? Physics is preeminent among sciences, but physics is not the only science. The "special sciences" traffic in kinds of object that do not exist so far as physics is concerned. Arguments casting doubt on tables cast doubt as well on planets, volcanoes, circulatory systems, and economies. Surely the legitimacy of such things is assured by their standing among the "higher-level" sciences. The emerging picture has a look of a winner. We concede the ground floor to physics, but we leave room in the upper tiers for objects blessed by the special sciences. These objects are likely to include many of our familiar everyday objects. What of everyday objects that do not figure in the special sciences? Tables might belong to this category. It would seem churlish not to allow that such things exist solely because they lack a scientific imprimatur. In resisting the pull of Eddington's argument, we embrace the thought that familiar objects are innocent until proven guilty. Attractive as all this might appear, a commitment to "higher-level" entities is not without cost. Suppose a Volvo is a "higher-level" entity. It is natural to think that when a Volvo strikes a pedestrian, the Volvo brings about a certain physical effect on the pedestrian. But, as Eddington would be first in line to point out, we are apparently able to account for the effects in this case by remaining at the basic physical level. The physical world is evidently "causally closed," at least in the sense that basic processes—those involving elementary particles, for instance—are governed by fundamental, exceptionless laws. This implies that, whenever a "lower-level" event occurs, its occurrence is a product exclusively of lower-level processes. We must, it seems, assume that any effects the Volvo has are traceable to effects of its fundamental physical constituents: the Volvo has no effects "over and above" the effects of these basic things acting in concert. If we regard a Volvo as a "higher-level" entity with its own independent reality, something distinct from the particles that make it up, we render it mysterious how Volvos could do anything at all. You might think that the difficulty here stems from allegiance to an optional philosophical principle according to which all explanation boils down to accounts of particles in motion (or whatever entities are endorsed

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by fundamental physics). We could abandon this principle in good conscience if that permitted us to make better sense of our world. After all we certainly seem to allow for causal relations among "higher-level" objects. Volvos injure pedestrians. Perhaps "higher-level" entities could have effects on other "higher-level" entities, leaving the particles to take care of themselves. A difficulty for this suggestion is that it is unclear how a given "higher-level" entity could bring about a particular "higher-level" effect except by bringing abut some "lower-level" effect. If Volvos and human beings are "higher-level" entities, it is hard to see how a Volvo could have an effect on a pedestrian without having an effect on the fundamental entities that make up that pedestrian. But how is this supposed to work? You might take "higher-level" entities to be made up of (even if not "reducible to") "lower-level" entities. Could a whole that includes certain parts causally influence those parts? This worry aside, if we suppose that "higher-level" objects could have effects on one another quite independently of effects of the arrangements of particles that make them up, that would seem to require that "higher-level" objects have "lower-level" effects. And that would mean that the particles might behave in ways inconsistent with the fundamental laws governing them, a prospect bordering on incoherence. The fundamental "level" of reality is causally self-contained: the behavior of the basic constituents is wholly a consequence of fundamental processes governing those constituents .^ From Words to World Must we choose between the devil and the deep blue sea? Must we either accept eliminativism, the idea that ordinary objects are at best fictions, or embrace "higher-level" objects and allow that apparent causal relations among these objects are deeply mysterious? Perhaps we were too quick to dismiss the possibility of reduction. Perhaps we could learn how to reduce talk of tables and Volvos to talk of particles in motion. This would be a matter of analyzing talk of tables and Volvos into particle-talk, or, at the very least, setting out necessary and sufficient conditions for tablehood or Volvohood in particle terms. I need not remind you that analytic reductions of this kind have enjoyed only limited success in philosophy. Indeed it has been the chronic failure of the analytic program that has driven philosophers to accept a

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conception of the world as "layered" or, alternatively, to go eliminativist. Are there any other options? Suppose we look again at an assumption mentioned earlier but left unexamined. This is the assumption that ontology c£in be "read off' our language. If you want to know what tables are, you dissect the table concept. This will reveal the nature of tables. You would then be in a position to determine whether anything in the world aligns with the table concept—or a suitably analyzed counterpart. There is plenty of evidence that this procedure spells bad news for tables. But before denigrating tables or engaging in the leap of faith required to embrace tables as "higher-level" objects, we might ask whether our linguistic starting point really is as obvious and inevitable as many analytic philosophers think it is. Why should we imagine that the nature of objects could be inferred from the ways we talk about them? Retum to Locke. Locke's idea was that, although certain terms—'table', for instance—expressed substantial concepts, it need not follow that objects picked out by those terms must be substances. The nature of those objects was something that could only be discovered via empirical scrutiny. It could turn out, on this view, that objects answering to substantial concepts (Locke's "sortals"), while nominally substances, in fact belonged to an altogether different ontological category: tables might, in Locke's terminology, be modes, not substances. The only true substances are the corpuscles. I have gone along with Locke's and Eddington's depiction of reality as particulate. But suppose it turned out that the world comprised a single, propertied space-time. Space-time would be the substance of the world: the One. A table might then be a local "thickening" of the One. When you slide the table across the room, or ship it to Detroit, tabular thickenings occupy successive spatio-temporal regions. The table's movement would tum out to be like the "movement" of a football across a television screen. The "movement" of the football is just a succession of stationary pixels tuming on and off. What if reality were like this? What if objects in the world were analogous to images on your television screen? Would it be true to say that your table moved across the room or moved to Detroit? Sticklers for precision, many, probably most, philosophers would say no: motion requires an object's occupying successive regions of space at successive times. Motion in a world of the One would be an illusion.

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But must we say this? Suppose, instead, emboldened by Locke, we interpret the discovery that reality is the One as a discovery of the deep truth about tables and motion. Here is a table. Surprisingly, the table tums out to be, not a substance, but a local thickening of the One. Here is a table's moving across the room. Surprisingly, the table's motion tums out to resemble the motion of the lump in the carpet, a wave across the ocean, a football on your television screen. If objects are liberated in this way from our concepts, how do we get any match at all between our words and the world? If we do not know what we are talking about when we are talking about tables, how could we confidently talk about tables! It is not as though our access to tables is exclusively, or even fundamentally, linguistic or conceptual. Eddington sat at his table, leaned on it, set cups of tea on it. You can refinish tables, pick them up, move them to Detroit, bump into them in the dark, grind them up in a scrounger. It seems not to matter very much at all that their nature is not fully captured in concepts that have evolved to enable us to converse about tables. Our interaction with objects in the world is only derivatively linguistic. We handle, manipulate, lift, collide with, are struck by, ingest, move, reorganize, purchase, embrace, and observe objects. We also discuss them. The idea that our only route to objects is a linguistic route is an artifact of a chronic philosophical obsession with language. The thought is that either you can specify necessary and sufficient conditions for what it would be to be a table (in particle terms, in terms of thickenings in the one, or what have you) or the relation between talk of tables and the world is hopelessly indeterminate and mysterious. But this misrepresents the connections of our words to the world. We use words as signs for objects to which we bear intimate non-linguistic relations. The point could be extended. Eddington calls attention to the "substantiality" of tables. His suggestion, expressed in the jargon of philosophers, is that substantiality is an "essential property" of tables. We are meant to take it that modem science has revealed that nothing is substantial—or at any rate no plausible table candidates are substantial. In that case, there are no tables. But before agreeing with Eddington, we should ask, what precisely is substantiality! Eddington himself poses this question and answers it straightforwardly: "I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying it is the kind of nature exemplified

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by an ordinary table" (Eddington 1928, ix). Substantiality in this sense, however, is most definitely possessed by Eddington's "scientific table"! Where does this leave us? The tmthmaker for "this is substantial" is a fleeting arrangement of particles—or perhaps a faint rippling of a certain region of the One. But now it seems open to us to say that the tmthmaker for 'This is a table' is this same dynamic arrangement of particles with a particular history and standing in particular relations to other dynamic arrangements of particles. Talk of tables and talk of substantiality cannot be translated into particle-talk or into talk of local thickenings of the One. We can—and typically do—speak of tables and their substantiality while knowing nothing of fundamental physics. There are two Eddingtons. One Eddington is mistaken. Twentiethcentury physics did not establish that nothing is substantial or that tables are fictions. Rather, as the second Eddington seems to suggest, physics has provided us with a deeper understanding of the nature of substantiality and the material nature of ordinary objects like tables. A view of this kind, a view inspired by Locke, distinguishes between tmth conditions and truthmakers. Tmth conditions of assertions are available to competent speakers. Tmthmakers, in contrast, are features of the world in virtue of which assertions are true. There is no reason to suppose that competent speeikers, owing solely to their being competent speakers, need to know very much at all about the nature of the tmthmakers for assertions about everyday objects. Truthmakers for Modal Predicates Many philosophers will remain dissatisfied with all this. How could tables tum out to be swarms of particles or local thickenings of the One? Tables and swarms are differently "individuated." Tables and swarms have different historical and modal properties. This way of putting it incorporates an important misrepresentation of the view, however. In following Locke, I am not embracing the meaty philosophical thesis that "composition is identity," at least not in the way that thesis is typically expounded. To see the point, look again at what philosophers like to call modal and historical properties. Recall that it is differences in the historical and modal properties of tables and transient swarms of particles that lead to doubts that tables could be in any sense identified with the swarms of particles making them

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up: composition is one thing, identity another. But what exactly are historical and modal properties? The swarm might be said to possess the modal property of being able to undergo a change of shape; the table could be said to lack this modal property and to possess the complementary modal property of being unable to change shape."* This could suggest that modal properties are on a par with powers or dispositions: just as a swarm, but not a table, would change shape if scrounged, a grain of salt, but not a grain of seind, would dissolve if immersed in water. The modal properties at issue are nothing like dispositions, however. True, the table "cannot" change shape, but this is not because tables are especially resistant to outside forces in the way a grain of sand might be resistant to dissolving in water. Rather, a table cannot change shape in the sense that, were the swarm of particles that makes up the table to undergo a sufficiently dramatic alteration, it—the swarm—would no longer count as a table. Similarly, the swarm cannot lose particles, not because the swarm is unusually resistant to forces that would hive off constituent particles, but because, once a swarm loses elements making it up, the depleted swarm no longer counts as the very same swarm. Consider what the tnithmaker might be for a claim of the form 'this table could not change shape'. Note first, that the claim appears in fact to be short for something like 'this table could not change shape and still count as a (or as the same) table'. This seems to point us away from tables and toward the table concept. What makes it true that a swarm of particles could change shape but could not lose particles that make it up? Nothing in the swarm itself makes such assertions true; the particles are there, coming and going as they please. We can know a priori that these truths hold of swarms because the truths concern, not properties of the swarms, but the concept of a swarm. Philosophers' offhand invocation of modal properties disguises this point. In playing along, in conceding the jargon, we risk being misled when we tum to the question posed above: what are the truthmakers for modal truths concerning tables or swarms of particles? The answer seems obvious: the objects' possession of certain modal properties. Suppose we look beyond this facile answer. Suppose we ask open-mindedly what the truthmakers might be for modal truths. What then? Here is one possibility. Talk of 'modal properties' is a philosophically pretentious, and potentially confusing, way of expressing constraints

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built into concepts we deploy. To say that tables and swarms of particles possess different modal properties is just an oblique way of calling attention to the evident fact that our table concept differs in important ways from our swarm concept. Among other things, this implies that talk of tables could not be reduced to, replaced by, or translated into talk of swarms, a point it is easy to concede. Thus construed, 'the swarm, but not the table, can survive being scrounged' should be understood as a claim, not about swarms and tables, but as a claim the truth of which depends on the swarm concept and the table concept. Are tables, then, mind-dependent entities? Not in any very interesting sense. We decide (or at any rate agree on) what is to count as a table, but an object's satisfying the table concept is a matter of that object's being a particular way quite independently of how we or anyone else might take it to be.s In this regard, tables are no more mind dependent than planets, beetroots, electrons, or swarms of particles. In each of these cases, we decide what is to answer to 'planet', or 'beetroot', 'electron', or 'swarm of particles', but our decisions on these matters and our subsequent application of the terms reflect real divisions in the world, divisions our concepts have evolved to mark off. Powers My suggestion is that philosophers' talk of modal properties is best construed as a potentially misleading way of invoking constraints on the application of substantival concepts. Does this mean that all "modal truths" are truths about, or express, conceptual constraints? Suppose properties (or some properties) are (or "bestow") powers on their possessors. Such powers might reasonably be accounted modal properties. In virtue of possessing a power (or disposition) to dissolve in water, it is true of this grain of salt that it would dissolve in water. A grain of sand, lacking this power, would not dissolve in water. Here, modal properties answer to modal truths. Earlier, I speculated that in discussions of identity and constitution, talk of modal properties inherits a kind of undeserved legitimacy by way of an implicit association with talk of powers or dispositions. Powers, however, are intrinsic features of objects. Being unable to gain or lose constituent particles, an imagined modal property of a swarm of particles.

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is certainly not an intrinsic characteristic of the swarm. Tmthmakers for ascriptions of modal tmths invoked in these contexts are not properties at all. The tmthmakers evidently include properties, but these are not "modal properties." Refiect on a table and the swarm of particles that makes it up at a particular time. If we exclude from consideration what I have identified as fraudulent modal properties, can we find a difference in properties of a sort that would incline us to distinguish the table and the swarm? E. J. Lowe thinks we can. Lowe focuses, not on tables and swarms, but on statues and lumps of bronze. Suppose the statue stands to the lump of bronze that makes it up as a table stands to the swarm of particles (or whatever) that makes it up. Might the statue differ from the lump with respect to its intrinsic powers or dispositions? If so, we should have a difference in real modal properties. Here is Lowe: The statue and the lump of bronze can in fact differ from one another, during the time of their coincidence, even in respect of certain of their dispositional properties—the implication being that not all of their dispositional properties are simply grounded in the properties and relations of the material particles which compose them. For example, we may say of the statue that it is disposed to cast a shadow of a certain shape, implying that if it were to be set on the ground and exposed to sunlight, a shadow of that shape would be cast on the ground at its foot. But we cannot say of the lump of bronze, without qualification, that it is disposed to cast a shadow of a particular shape. For, whereas the statue, so long as it exists, must retain a certain constant shape, this is not true of the lump of bronze. G-owe 2002, 72)

Is Lowe right? Does the statue differ dispositionally from the lump of bronze during the time the statue exists? Suppose the statue exists on Friday during which time it coincides spatially with the lump of bronze. The question is whether, on Friday, the statue possesses a power or disposition the lump of bronze does not possess. TJie statue has the power to cast a statue-shaped shadow. Does the lump of bronze possess this power? It does, so long as the statue does. At any time the statue has this power, so does the lump. To be sure, the lump could lose this power, and the statue could not. But no modal properties answer to this modal tmth. It expresses no more than that nothing could count as this statue unless it possessed this power.

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I do not want to put excessive weight on this point. My aim is not to show that composition is identity if this is taken to imply that talk of tables or statues could be analyzed into talk of particles or lumps. I readily accept that modal and historical constraints on the application of these concepts ensure that this is most unlikely. Nor are we philosophers likely to uncover necessary and sufficient conditions for statuehood or tablehood in lump or particulate terms. The question is, what are we to conclude from this? Realism About Tables (and Statues) Although our table concept and swarm concept differ in their application and identity conditions, the very same swarm of particles could, on occasion, satisfy both concepts. In fashioning a lump of bronze into a statue of Lincoln, an artisan fashions a statue. Now the very same portion of matter answers to the statue concept and the lump concept. It is natural to express this fact by saying that the lump is the statue. The same would be true of the table and the swarm of particles that make it up. So long as the coming and going of particles maintains the right sort of stability, the table is the swarm, the swarm the table. You might prefer the idea that tables and statues are not objects at all, but modes: ways objects are. Statues, on this view, and tables, are just statue- or table-shaped collections of particles or regions of the One. I have already flagged one worry about a view of this kind. If we follow out the reasoning consistently, we risk being left with the idea that nothing exists beyond the particles or the One, the atoms and the void. What is the truth here? What do we require in order to say that tables or statues exist? What is it to be a realist about such things? Suppose we ask what is required for God to create a universe like ours containing tables and statues. God will need to create the atoms and the void (the elementary particles, or the One, or what have you), and arrange the atoms appropriately. If tables and statues require distinctively intelligent intervention, then in creating a universe incorporating tables and statues, God will need to create dynamic, interactive, possibly widely dispersed constellations of particles. Once this is accomplished, God will have created a world containing tables and statues: it will be true there are tables and statues. The truthmakers for table or statue talk will be staggeringly complex

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and, from the point of view of physics, wholly unremarkable. Nevertheless, it will be true, literally true, that there are tables and statues (and, for that matter, that there are swarms of particles and lumps of bronze). Does this deflate ordinary objects? It deflates a certain conception of what the tmthmakers must be for claims about ordinary objects to be true. It is an open question what the ultimate truthmakers are for true descriptions of the world we deploy in everyday life and in the laboratory. Return to the idea that the world comprises a single space-time manifold: the One. What we regard as distinct objects are ways the One is organized. Were this so, Locke would be vindicated: the deep truth about objects like tables, statues, swarms, and lumps would be that such things are in fact modes. Is our ordinary talk of statues and lumps of bronze at odds with this possibility? Again, I do not see why we must think so. Many philosophers who would be inclined to think so are, it should seem, beguiled by a conception of language according to which we can "read off' features of reality from our styles of representation. This is the linguistic tail waging the ontological dog. John Heil Monash University and Washington University in St. Louis

NOTES *I have benefited from discussion with D. M. Armstrong, David Robb, and Amie Thomasson, and from comments of an anonymous referee. 1. The temperaments discussed here are nicely represented in Rea (1997). See Heil (2003) for an extended discussion. 2. Once we start down this road, we could come to doubt swarms as well. There are the particles and their locations. Are there swarms as well? 3. What if every entity is a "higher-level" entity the "lower-level" realizers of which are themselves entities with still "lower-level" realizers: "levels" all the way down! Does causality thereby "drain away" (Block 2003; Kim 2003)? Although it could be an empirical question whether reality is infinitely divisible, this need not entail the existence of an infinity of levels of being. Indeed there are independent reasons to think that, whatever reality's complexity, there are no levels of being (see Heil 2003). 4. A mild idealization. T'ables can change shape within limits. Similarly swarms of particles (or honeybees) might gain or lose members within limits. 5. You might think that tables are mind-dependent in the sense that only an artifact, only something manufactured by an intelligent agent, could count as a table. In that case

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a mind must figure in the causal process culminating in a table. This is not a form of antirealism about tables, however, merely a recognition that the conditions required for the satisfaction of the table concept include minds playing appropriate causal roles.

REFERENCES Block, N. J. (2003) "Do Causal Powers Drain Away?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67: 133-50. Eddington, A. S. (1928) The Nature ofthe Physical World (New York: Macmillan). Heil, J. (2003) From an Ontological Point ofVtew (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Kim, J. (2003) "Blocking Causal Drainage and Other Maintenance Chores with Mental Causation." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67: 151-76. Lowe, E. J. (2002) A Survey of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Rea, Michael, ed. (1997) Material Constitution: A Reader (Lanham, MD: Worman & Littlefield).