intuitions relevant to the issue at hand when assessing a given theory. The history of
philosophy as well as comparative contemporary philosophy can help here.^26 But so
could the use of the theoretical tools and methods characteristic of the social sciences.
It is here that there is room for a kind of“experimental philosophy”to play a role
even in fundamental ontological investigations.^27
Let me illustrate with an example. Many of us have had the following experience.
You are teaching an undergraduate philosophy class—perhaps it is an introductory
class—and for some reason the topic of the existence of abstract objects has come up.
Some student—often many students!—resists the claim that the number two exists in
the same way that tables exist. The student is happy to say that there are numbers,
and is happy to say that there are tables. But the student hesitates to say that they enjoy
the same kind of existence. You are convinced that the student must be confused—
everything that there is exists in the same way, after all, so either the student really
wants to say that the number two does not exist, or the student mistakenly thinks that
“to exist”really means something like“to exist and to be spatiotemporal”. You
experience frustration as you try to get the student to grasp the concept of a generic
unrestricted quantifier. The student experiences frustration as well.
On the position that I endorse, the metaphysical mistake is yours, not the
student’s. The student presumably has two non-overlapping existence-concepts,
one of which ranges over concrete objects, while the other ranges over abstract
objects. Each of the student’s concepts latches on to something ontologically import-
ant. The unrestricted quantifier that you are desperately trying to foist on the student
is less fundamental than the restricted quantifiers your student currently (and
successfully) employs. By my lights, you do the student a disservice by leading her
to trade her concepts for yours.
Regardless of whether you share my evaluation of the student’s ontological scheme,
many of us have had this sort of classroom experience. It would be worth doing some
experimental philosophy to assess the extent that the folk accept some sort of frag-
mentation of being. I have not done so here in this book. I hope that in the future I can
enlist some experimental philosophers to work with me or at least inspire them to
investigate on their own. Philosophy is neverfinished. There is always more work to
be done.
(^26) See McDaniel (2014b) for further methodological explorations.
(^27) There is also a role for collaborative work of the sort envisioned by Paul (2010a) between philo-
sophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists on how these intuitions are brought about.