The Ontological Significance of Constitution

There is much to admire in Lynne Baker's (2007) The Metaphysics of Everyday Life, and much that I agree with: particularly the need to defend the existence of ordinary objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones against various forms of eliminativism and reductionism. Given this common orientation, we also fight many of the same battles - e.g., against arguments for denying the existence of ordinary objects on grounds of their alleged causal redundancy or violation of constraints of parsimony. Finally, we both agree that the distinction between those objects that are and are not 'mind-dependent' is, as Baker would put it, not 'ontologically significant': that mind-dependence is no grounds for denying the existence of entities like drivers' licenses, works of art, or college degrees, so that "what is in the ontology need not be wholly independent of us" (2007, 20). In fact, on most of the major first-order issues in metaphysics, Baker and I are in broad agreement.There is, however, a significant area in which we at least seem to disagree: in our metametaphysics, or perhaps more simply put, in how we each see what we are doing in making our first-order metaphysical claims. Throughout her new book, Baker often turns to defend what she calls a 'robust' approach to metaphysics, and rejects 'conceptual' or 'linguistic' approaches to metaphysical problems. Accordingly, she has expressed reservations about what she sees as my 'linguistic' approach, writing, e.g. (in her comments on Ordinary Objects): "Whereas Thomasson takes metaphysical problems to be dissolved by conceptual analysis and empirical discovery, I'll suggest that we still need good old-fashioned metaphysics." And, "linguistic considerations," she writes, "are not enough to vindicate our commonsense worldview of ordinary objects. We need a more robust metaphysics."1It is true that our approaches differ, at least on the surface: I tend to defuse the arguments against ordinary objects by showing how some of the key arguments against them rely on misuses of words, or on treating certain metaphysical principles as perfectly general which don't apply when the claims involved are analytically interrelated. And I argue that the questions of metaphysics are answerable straightforwardly by a combination of conceptual and empirical enquiry: questions of what exists are answerable by determining what the application conditions for our terms are (conceptual analysis) and seeing whether they are fulfilled (the empirical part).2 True claims of metaphysical necessity, I have argued (Thomasson 2007b), are object-language reflections of rules of use for our terms (or their consequences).Baker, by contrast, appeals to the metaphysical relation of constitution both to explain what ordinary objects are and how they are related to underlying physical objects, and to explain away various puzzles associated with ordinary objects. Constitution, she writes "is a single comprehensive metaphysical relation that unites items at different levels of reality into the objects that we experience in everyday life" (Baker 2007, 32); it "is the metaphysical glue, so to speak, of the material world" (Baker 2007, 177-78). Properly understood, she argues, constitution can provide a "theoretical explanation" (Baker 2007, 239) of certain facts about constituted entities. It "accounts for the unity of a constituted object" (Baker 2007, 165) and explains, e.g., why "many properties are shared by both constituter and constituted" (Baker 2007, 39).What I will suggest here is that Baker's way of presenting her constitution view as a robust metaphysical discovery of a relation that plays a theoretical-explanatory role opens her up to a line of awkward questions and objections about whether it really does explanatory work or just gives a name to the various problems. These, in fact, are some of the objections that have been most repeatedly raised against her account.My project here is to examine what happens if we pair Baker's firstorder metaphysical story of constitution with a more deflationary metametaphysical picture. …