compelling, ultimately I do not think that they succeed. In section 7.6, I investigate
whether there is some reason to prefer takingdegree of beingas the primitive notion.
There, I discuss an intriguing argument based on the idea that theories making use of
degree of beingare more ideologically parsimonious. Although this argument is
inconclusive, I view it as in better shape than the arguments for taking naturalness/
structure as the prior notion. I thereby endorse a disjunctive conclusion: either the
notational variant hypothesis is true—in which case contemporary metaphysicians
have been employing degrees of being in their theorizing, albeit not under that
guise—or the notion that contemporary metaphysicians have been employing
ought to be further analyzed in terms of degree of being. If either disjunct is true,
then contemporary metaphysicians need to rethink what they’ve been up to when
theorizing in metaphysics, and how their theorizing is oriented towards those long
dead who theorized before them. Section 7.7 discusses whether the view defended
here faces the objections that Sider (2011: 164–5) raises against what he calls“entity-
fundamentality.”Finally, section 7.8 briefly discusses an epistemic advantage to
taking degrees of being as the prior notion, and indicates some lines of further
research worth pursuing.
7.2 Degrees of Being
The view I mean to defend is the view forcefully rejected by McTaggart (1927a: 4–5)
in the following passage:
A thing cannot be more or less real than another which is also real. It has been said that reality
does admit of degrees. But this can...betraced to one of two confusions.... Sometimes reality
has been confused with power... [but] a thing which asserts more power is not more real than
one that asserts less. Sometimes... the possibility of degrees of reality is based on the possibility
of degrees of truth.... If, for example, it should be truer to say that the universe was an
organism than that it was an aggregate, then it is supposed that we may say that an organic
universe is more real than an aggregate-universe. But this is a mistake.
I grant that it would be a mistake to confuse power with reality and a mistake to
accept degrees of truth. So let’s not make these mistakes. On the view that I am
considering, being is not to be conflated with some other feature that comes in
degrees. Being itself comes in degrees: to be simpliciter is to be to some degree or
other, just as to have mass simpliciter is to have some determinate amount of mass.
And just as not everything has the same amount of mass, not everything that is exists
to the same degree.^2
(^2) Hughes (1989: 26) denies that existence comes in degrees. Miller (2002) defends the claim that some
instances of existence are“richer”than others, but since Miller’s system seems vastly different from my
own, I will not pursue this idea further here.