this notion of transparency, and in fact distinguishes several varieties of transpar-
ency. One of them ismodal transparency, which Fine (2012b: 23) defines as follows: a
concept ofxis modally transparent just in case it is necessarily a concept ofx. Fine
claims that the concept of water is not modally transparent. We’ll focus on modal
transparency here, and thus ourfirst question will be the question of whether our
concept of existence is modally transparent.
In order for there to be an interesting question about whether a given concept is
modally transparent, concepts can’t be individuated simply by their worldly correl-
ates. Otherwise, every non-empty concept will be modally transparent. For example,
provided that concepts are individuated this way and that the concept of water’s
worldly correlate isbeing composed of H 2 O molecules, there is no world in which the
concept of water exists and yet is not a concept of being composed of H 2 O molecules.
But the concept of water is supposed to be the paradigmatic non-transparent
concept, since a world in which from an internal perspective all is the same and yet
our environment differs—it contains“twin water”rather than water—is a world in
which our concept of water is about a different object than what it is actually about. It
seems then that a necessary condition for a concept to be modally transparent is that
contingent facts about the environment of the concept’s possessor cannot partially
determine the worldly correlate of that concept.
If the indexical view is right about the concepts of presentness, actuality, and
existence, then these concepts are not modally transparent. My merely possible twin
has the same concept of actuality that I have—it is an indexical concept much like the
concept of water—but I successfully grasp an ontological feature via this concept
whereas my twin either does not grasp a feature at all, in which case his perspective is
defective, or he grasps a different ontological feature than I do. Either way, there is
distance between our concepts and what they are concepts of. Accordingly, we
cannot characterize what distinguishes metaphysical inquiry from other forms of
inquiry by appealing to the modal transparency of its concepts. I don’t know how
detrimental this observation would be to Fine’s (2012b) project. It is not clear to me
whether he takes the modal transparency of a concept to benecessary(rather than
sufficient) for its status as an a priori concept, and the latter seems to be at least as
important to metaphysical inquiry.
3.9 Chapter Summary
In this chapter, I developed a version of ontological pluralism that respects two
common intuitions about time: that the present moment is metaphysically distin-
guished but not in such a way that the past is unreal. The version of ontological
pluralism developed—PEP—is one in which there are two modes of being, the mode
of being that present objects enjoy and the mode of being that past objects enjoy.
I argued that this view fares at least as well, and probably better, than other views in
which the present is metaphysically distinguished.