But let us provisionally grant this assumption. Then ideological parity will have
been restored. In both cases, there is one primitive comparative notion. On this view,
the notion of naturalness has straightforward existential implications, and not only in
the trivial way in which if something has a property, then it is something. (If a
property is natural, it follows that the property is something, just as it follows from
the claim that my dog is hungry, that my dog is something.)An assertion of the
naturalness of a property straightforwardly implies the existence of a thing beyond the
property itself.In short, the fundamental notion of naturalnessis an existentially
loaded notion. One ought to conclude that those who speak of naturalness speak of
gradations of being, albeit under a different guise.
Either the NVH is true or it is false becausenaturalnessought to be understood in
terms ofdegrees of being.
7.7 Entity Fundamentalism
The view defended here takes the locus of fundamentality to be entities that enjoy
various amounts of reality: relative fundamentality simply is relative amount of
being. Sider (2011: 164–5) has argued against views of broadly this sort; here we’ll
see whether the objections have merit.
Briefly, Sider offers three arguments. Thefirst argument is that taking entities as
fundamental requires thinking of abstract objects as the locus of fundamentality, and
this is problematic. Reply: it requires thinking of abstract objects as enjoying some
degree of fundamentality, i.e., some amount of being, but this is not problematic, for
they do enjoy some amount of being. The only remaining question is how much. The
approach here does not imply that only abstract objects enjoy some amount of
reality; that claim would be absurd. Nor does it imply that abstract objects are as
real as concrete objects; some might be, but many will not be.
The second argument is that taking entities as the locus of fundamentality
conflates whether an entity is fundamental with whether what that entity represents
is fundamental. I deny that this conflation is a consequence of the view. First, neither
objects nor properties are representational qua object or property. I represent noth-
ing except only in some very strained sense, but even then, no one should conflate the
claim that I enjoy some degree of reality with the claim that whatever I represent
enjoys that degree of reality. The property of being blue is also not a representation.
Sentences are representational; they also have some degree of reality. That degree of
reality needn’t be proportional to the degree of reality of that fact that the sentence
pictures, and in many cases it won’t be. Perhaps propositions are“intrinsically
representational”but, as with sentences, one shouldn’t run together a claim about
how much being a proposition has with a claim about how much being the corres-
ponding state of affairs has, even when that proposition is about the amount of being
a given state of affairs enjoys.