Given that both sides can in some way recognize the senses of“being”postulated,
is there anything here worth worrying about? The question of the meaning of“being”
might be interesting to a linguist, but why should a metaphysician care about it? The
job of the unrestricted quantifier is to range over everything there is. As long as it
does this, why care about the question of the meaning of“being”?
1.3 Theodore Sider meets Martin Heidegger
Even though Heidegger recognizes van Inwagen’s general concept of being, and van
Inwagen could in principle recognize Heidegger’s various senses of“being,”there is
still a question about which is moremetaphysically fundamental. In what follows,
I discuss how one can make sense of the notion that one quantifier is more
fundamental than another.
It is one thing to recognize an aspect of an object, and another thing to hold that
the aspect isbasic,orfundamental,or—to use the terminology of David Lewis (1983a
and 1986)—perfectly natural.^35 Consider the property of having a charge of1 and
the property of either being loved by Sarah Jessica Parker or having a charge of1.
Eddie the electron exemplifies both features.1chargeis a real respect of similarity
between electrons, but it is bizarre to think that Matthew Broderick and Eddie are
similar in virtue of both of them enjoying either being loved by Sarah Jessica Parker or
having a charge of1. There is a metaphysical distinction between these two features:
the former propertycarves nature at the joints, while the latter is amere disjunction.
Embracing a notion of naturalness does not require embracing a robust ontology
of properties.^36 Regardless of whether there“really are”properties, there is an
important metaphysical difference between predicates like“is an electron”and
predicates like“is an electron if discovered before 2024 or is a positron”. Sider
(2009) discusses several nominalistic accounts of naturalness. One account takes
the notion of naturalness to apply to languages rather than properties. Informally, a
language is more natural than another language to the degree that its primitive (i.e.,
undefined) locutions match the joints of reality. Formally, the notion of one language
being more natural than another is simply taken as primitive by the nominalist.
A second account introduces a primitive sentence-operatorNthat can be prefixed to
pairs of open sentences. Sentences of the form“N(xis an F,xis a G)”are ascriptions
of comparative naturalness: informally, they tell us that to be an F is more natural
than to be a G.^37 Presumably there are other ways in which a clever nominalist could
(^35) See also Merrill (1980).
(^36) Lewis (1983a) discusses ways in which the nominalist could account for naturalness without
properties. 37
Perhaps it would be better to informally understandNas“at least as natural as,”but nothing turns on
this in what follows. Note that Sider (2011) now prefers to use an“S”operator instead, which is monadic
rather than binary. As far as I can tell, nothing of substance here hangs on which locution to prefer, though
in chapter 7 we will return to the question of which notion of naturalness or structure is better to employ.