same way as an actual donkey exists, then any knowledge of its existence must be via
the ways in which we know actual donkeys exist.^71 I suspect that there are also
different normative and evaluative principles governing these two modes of exist-
ence. For example, how we should feel about the pleasures and pains of possible
people and how we should feel about the pleasures and pains of actual people are very
different. Like many, I also don’t see how the Lewisian view can make sense of
this difference.^72
More generally, different modes of being might ground differences in our routes to
having knowledge of or evidence about the entities that enjoy those modes. In the
introduction, I discussed what I called thephenomenological motivationfor onto-
logical pluralism, which makes much use of this idea. In line with this motivation,
one might hold that things enjoying actual concrete existence are knowable only
empirically, that abstracta are known via intuition, that possibilia are known via
imagination, and that ethical realities are known via emotion. In each case, the mode
of access to entities enjoying a certain mode of being is ultimately grounded in the
mode of being itself.
Our discussion of a wide variety of different ontological schemes in this chapter
has moved rapidly. In the chapters that follow, we will slow things down considerably
when assessing whether there are further reasons to think that being fragments.
2.8 Chapter Summary
In this chapter, I explored the metaphysics of what I called“analogous properties.”
An analogous property is a non-specific property that is less natural than its
specifications (which I called“analogue instances”) but is not as unnatural as a
merely disjunctive property. I discussed and then applied two tests for being an
analogous property: a property is analogous provided that it has more unity than a
mere disjunction but yet systematically varies with respect to either its logical form or
the axioms that govern its behavior. I used the notion of an analogous property to
formulate several more versions of ontological pluralism. One kind of ontological
pluralism appealed to a distinction between absolute and relative modes of existence.
This distinction between modes of being was then used to articulate one kind of
ontological superiority, which I called“orders of being.”
(^71) Compare with Skyrms (1976: 326).
(^72) Lewis (1986: 123–8) attempts to address this sort of worry, unsuccessfully in my view.