Is it a falsehood to speak of objects as if they exist?

A defense of van Inwagen against Merrick

Zvi Hershel Fishman

Columbia University
5/6/2019
Contact: hershy.fishman2@gmail.com

Philosophical positions sometimes clash with ordinary speech. For example, a skeptic who

denies that knowledge is attainable faces the question of whether a sentence in ordinary speech

containing the phrase ‘I know that’ is necessarily a falsehood. Trenton Merricks (2001) discusses

a similar question regarding his view that inanimate objects like tables, chairs, and statues do not

exist. In Merricks’s view, only the atoms1 that are thought (incorrectly) to compose the inanimate

objects exist but those atoms don’t compose anything. He calls this view that eliminates the

existence of inanimate objects, ‘eliminativism’. After establishing eliminativism, Merricks goes

on to argue (pp. 162-190) that since inanimate objects do not exist, therefore whenever people

(‘the folk’) talk about inanimate objects in ordinary speech as if inanimate objects exist, the folk

speak falsely. Merricks rejects van Inwagen’s (1990, §§10–11) view that even according to

eliminativism the folk do not speak falsely when they talk about inanimate objects in ordinary

speech. I will argue that van Inwagen’s position is much more defensible than would seem from

the way it is portrayed by Merricks.

Merricks (pp. 162-163) starts the discussion about the truth value of expressions in ordinary

speech that imply the existence of inanimate objects by citing van Inwagen (1990, §§10–11).

1
As Merricks does (p. 3), I use ‘atom’ as a placeholder for fundamental particles of physics that are simples,
assuming they exist.

1
Like Merricks, van Inwagen had argued for the non-existence of inanimate objects.2 However,

van Inwagen argued that when people talk about inanimate objects in ordinary speech they are

not speaking falsely because their use of a term like ‘chair’ should be taken to refer to the atoms

arranged chairwise. Merricks understood van Inwagen’s reasoning to be that the folk are

speaking loosely when they talk about chairs because ‘eliminativism is consistent with what all

people believe’ (Merricks p. 163). I will focus on Merricks’s first two arguments against this

claim that the beliefs and ordinary speech of the folk are consistent with eliminativism.

Merricks’s first argument (p. 163) is against the idea that ordinary folk belief is consistent with

eliminativism. Merricks’s argument is that eliminativism is ‘undeniably striking and surprising’,

and if eliminativism is consistent with what all people believe, then it wouldn’t seem striking and

surprising.

Merricks’s second argument (pp. 163-167) focuses on an analogy made by van Inwagen (1990,

pp. 101–102). Van Inwagen made the point that just as the sentence ‘The sun moved behind the

elms’ may be describing a true event ‘in a misleading or loose or even wrong way’ (van Inwagen

p. 101), given the fact that the earth rather than the sun moves, and still if the event that the sun

appeared to move behind the elms in fact occurred, the sentence ‘The sun moved behind the

elms’ would be true, similarly the sentence ‘There are two very valuable chairs in the next room’

would be true if it describes a true fact about atoms arranged chairwise. Merricks (p. 165) claims

that van Inwagen’s analogy between chairs existing and the sun moving “does double duty for

van Inwagen.” First, it serves to describe van Inwagen’s view that ordinary speech about chairs is

2
However, van Inwagen and Merricks differ on whether unconscious living organisms exist. According to van
Inwagen the criteria for existence as a composite object is to constitute a life, but according Merricks the criteria for
existence is to be causally non‐redundant (p. 114). Merricks is open to the possibility that molecules or plants, for
example, may be causally non‐redundant and therefore exist (p. 115). However, he considers conscious mental
properties to be the only properties that are known to confer causal non‐redundancy on the composite objects that
possess them (Chapter 4, pp. 85-117).

2
like ordinary speech about the sun moving. Second, it serves as a defense of van Inwagen’s view

by arguing that just as talk about the sun moving is not false, so it is with talk about chairs.

Merricks (pp. 165-167) then argues that this analogy between chairs existing and the sun moving

actually works against van Inwagen. Merricks agrees that Copernicans (as are most ordinary

people today) who know that the sun doesn’t really orbit the earth but use the term ‘the sun

moved’ loosely are not uttering a falsehood, and similarly an eliminativist who talks about

‘chairs’ loosely is also not uttering a falsehood (Merricks, p. 186). However, he argues that a

non-Copernican who thinks that the sun orbits the earth does utter a falsehood when he talks

about the sun moving, and similarly the folk who think that chairs really exist utter falsehoods

when they talk about chairs. Merricks understood van Inwagen’s analogy between chairs and the

sun moving to be comparing an ordinary person talking about chairs to an ordinary person (a

Copernican) talking about the sun moving and van Inwagen’s point to be that in both cases the

ordinary person is speaking loosely. Merricks’s argument is that clearly unlike talk about the sun

moving, people are not talking loosely when they talk about chairs.

If van Inwagen indeed meant that ordinary people talk loosely when they talk about chairs, this

would mean that according to van Inwagen not only are the beliefs of ordinary people consistent

with eliminativism, but ordinary people are actually eliminativist (and thus speak loosely when

they say ‘there are chairs’, just as they speak loosely when they say ‘the sun moved’ because

they are Copernicans). Such a position that ordinary people are eliminativists is absurd. In fact,

as Merricks correctly argues, even the position that eliminativism is consistent with what

everyone believes seems indefensible. However, I think that Merricks mischaracterized van

Inwagen’s position. As I will elaborate, I think that van Inwagen clearly agrees that

eliminativism is inconsistent with ordinary belief. Van Inwagen’s view is thus consistent with

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eliminativism’s striking and surprising nature. I will also show that van Inwagen’s analogy to the

sun moving was not meant to argue that the folk speak loosely when they talk about chairs. A

proper understanding of van Inwagen’s position will show that Merricks is not necessarily right

that the folk are speaking falsely when they talk about inanimate objects as if they exist.

What do the folk believe?

Before I get to van Inwagen, I want to discuss what I think the folk actually believe regarding

mereology. Merricks talks about the folk ontology as if it is homogenous, and he never

elaborates on what the folk ontology actually is. However, I think we have to differentiate

between two types of folk: those who don’t know about atoms (which includes children, people

of the past, and many people today, even educated ones who may have learned about atoms in

school but didn’t internalize it) and those who do know about atoms. In the minds of those who

don’t know about atoms, a chair or table must be a single being. Those people don’t even have

the tools to entertain any other concept of a chair or table. But for people who are keenly aware

that everything is made out of atoms, it is unclear what they think of when they say ‘chair’ or

‘table’. I believe that most of them think that there is a chair made of atoms, and if asked if there

is a chair in addition to the atoms, they would say ‘no’; thus they think along the lines of

composition as identity (see Merricks pp. 20-24). However, some of the scientifically-minded

people who think more deeply about scientific concepts and are aware not only about atoms but

that everything has vague boundaries might indeed be eliminativists or close to being

eliminativists.3 I doubt that a significant number of people if any think that there are chairs in

addition to the atoms. Merricks’s idea of ‘folk ontology’ definitely works for the concept of

3
See the excerpt from Richard Feynman’s Lectures in Physics in van Inwagen (1990, before the Table of Contents):
‘What is a chair? Well, a chair is a certain thing over there . . . certain?, how certain? The atoms are evaporating
from it from time to time…’

4
objects as single beings held by the folk who don’t know about atoms, but it is unclear to me if

everything Merricks says about the folk ontology also works for composition as identity.4

Van Inwagen’s view on what the folk believe

What does van Inwagen say about the folk’s beliefs regarding eliminativism? Van Inwagen does

indeed say that eliminativism ‘does not contradict our ordinary beliefs’ in the title of §10 (van

Inwagen, p. 98, “Why the Proposed Answer to the Special Composition Question, Radical

Though It Is, Does Not Contradict Our Ordinary Beliefs”). However, from everything van

Inwagen says in the text of all of Sections 10 and 11 it is clear that he didn’t mean to say in the

title of §10 that the folk’s beliefs are consistent with eliminativism. (Below I will explain what I

believe he meant by ‘ordinary beliefs’ in the title). First, throughout his book, van Inwagen is

clear about his view being radical and that most people (even philosophers) would reject it. For

example, he starts his book by saying (p. 1):

The theory of material things presented in this book has seemed to many of the

philosophers who have read the book in manuscript to be a very strange one. This

reaction seems to be based on a single consequence of the theory: that there are no tables

or chairs or any other visible objects except living organisms. Let us call this

consequence of the theory “the Denial”… No doubt many philosophers who understand

the Denial perfectly will find it incredible…

As for ordinary people van Inwagen says, ‘If you were to tell the ordinary man that I thought that

there were no chairs, he would probably think I was mad’ (p. 107). Although here van Inwagen

4
For example, what Merricks says (pp. 175-185) that folk ontology cannot account for convention, or the courts,
playing a role in determining the identity over time of a statue or what he says that the concept of arranged stauewise
is based on the counterpossible that there are statues (p. 5) and thus ‘presupposes a grasp of, and requires some sort
of use of, the folk concept of statue’ (p. 188).

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was only saying that the ordinary man wouldn’t understand what is meant by eliminativism

which leaves open the possibility that eliminativism were it understood by the ordinary man

would be consistent with his beliefs, still if van Inwagen believes that ‘no doubt many

philosophers who understand [eliminativism] perfectly will find it incredible’ (p. 1), van

Inwagen can’t believe that eliminativism is consistent with what everyone believes. Even in that

same title of §10 (p. 98), van Inwagen says, ‘Why [van Inwagen’s view about when simples

compose something—ZHF], radical though is, does not contradict our ordinary beliefs’,

acknowledging that eliminativism5 is radical. Moreover, the idea that Merricks implies that van

Inwagen holds that when ordinary folk say ‘chairs exist’ they are speaking loosely is clearly

contradicted by van Inwagen: ‘I am not proposing an analysis of common language. I am

offering a metaphysical theory. The only thing I have to say about what the ordinary man really

means by “There are two valuable chairs in the next room” is that he really means that there are

two valuable chairs in the next room…’ (van Inwagen, p. 106).

Van Inwagen however says that eliminativism does not contradict Universal Belief, which he

defines as ‘that body of propositions that has been accepted by every human being who has ever

lived, bar a few imbeciles and madmen…’ (van Inwagen, p.103). As I discussed above regarding

what scientifically minded people believe, I think that this view that eliminativism does not

contradict Universal Belief is reasonable.

Below I will show yet more conclusively that van Inwagen did not mean what Merricks

understood him to mean that eliminativism is consistent with the folk’s beliefs, but first I will

discuss the more important matter, namely what I think van Inwagen actually says about the truth

value of ordinary speech about inanimate objects.

5
As is clear from the context, it was the eliminativist aspect of his view that van Inwagen was referring to in this
title (not the idea that what constitutes a life does exist).

6
Van Inwagen’s reasoning for why ordinary speech about chairs is often true

Van Inwagen explains his reasoning for why he believes that eliminativism is consistent with

ordinary speech in the continuation of the following quote I quoted above: ‘The only thing I have

to say about what the ordinary man really means by “There are two valuable chairs in the next

room” is that he really means that there are two valuable chairs in the next room’ (p. 106). Van

Inwagen continues as follows (pp. 106-107):

In my view, this sentence is sufficiently empty of metaphysical commitment… In a

similar vein, I would say that what is ordinarily expressed by “It was cooler in the garden

when the sun had moved behind the elms” is consistent with both Ptolemaic and

Copernican astronomy. (It may be that the word ‘moved’ occurs in the idiom this

sentence exemplifies because the first people to use this idiom accepted some geocentric

account of the apparent motion of the sun. But that would not entail that an astronomical

theory was built into the meaning of this idiom.)

Van Inwagen’s point that terms like ‘chair’ are empty of metaphysical commitment is (as he

makes a little clearer regarding the sun moving) that the false beliefs that people have about what

chairs are metaphysically are not built into the meaning of the term. Van Inwagen (§11) then

explains that terms like ‘chair’ should be taken to mean atoms arranged chairwise.

In many cases it would be uncontroversial to say that false beliefs are not built into terms. For

example, in the minds of Hellenic fundamentalists the sun is Apollo's chariot (Merricks, p. 173),

yet (issues of eliminativism aside) Hellenic fundamentalists wouldn’t be speaking falsely by

using the term ‘the sun’. Why is the argument for saying that terms for objects like ‘chair’ (or

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‘sun’ for that matter, as far as eliminativism is concerned) have the false belief about them built

into them? The fact that the term ‘chair’, for example, is a singular term and has the same

grammatical structure as terms for singular objects (e.g. atoms) is insufficient to explain why the

concept of a chair as a singular object (as opposed to atoms arranged chairwise) is built into the

term ‘chair’ because many singular terms with identical grammatical structures do not carry the

connotation that the concept of a singular object is necessarily built into them even according to

Merricks. Merricks (p. 10) gives the example of ‘the Crew of the USS Enterprise’ as an

expression he agrees might refer to the separate crew members and not to an imaginary object

that is a crew. Other examples of singular terms like ‘crew’ are ‘crowd’ and ‘university’. Rather,

the reason terms for objects like ‘chair’ do carry the connotation that they refer to singular

objects (at least according to Merricks, see below) is simply because of the intuition of what

these terms mean. There are two levels of intuition here. First, there is an intuition that (alleged)

objects like chairs are singular objects. This intuition informs the beliefs of the folk and is

rejected by eliminativists like Merricks but is still experienced and felt even by eliminativists.

Second, there is an intuition accepted (and informing the beliefs of) both the folk and

eliminativists like Merricks that the concept of a chair as a singular object is essential to the

meaning of the term ‘chair’. In contrast, the concept of the sun being Apollo's chariot is not

essential to the meaning of the term ‘sun’ even in the minds of Hellenic fundamentalists (while

for terms like ‘crew’ there is no false belief associated with them to begin with). The fact that

there are these intuitions is sufficient to explain the difference between terms like ‘chair’ and

terms like ‘sun’ (with respect to the false belief that it is Apollo's chariot) or terms like ‘crew’ at

the level I’m interested in in this paper. The underlying explanation for why there are these

intuitions would be interesting but beyond the scope of this discussion.

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Although van Inwagen disagrees with Merricks’s view that the concept of a single object that is a

chair is built into the meaning of the word ‘chair’, I think van Inwagen doesn’t deny that there is

at least somewhat of an intuition that ‘chair’ means a single object that is a chair. The reason I

think that van Inwagen doesn’t deny that there is at least somewhat of an intuition that ‘chair’

means a single object that is a chair is because, as Merricks (p. 165) mentions, van Inwagen

compares talk of chairs to talk of the sun moving (and similar cases) where people talk ‘in a

misleading or loose or even wrong way’ (van Inwagen p. 101). If van Inwagen wouldn’t

recognize any intuition that terms like ‘chair’ mean single objects there would be no reason for

him to make this comparison (see below, next paragraph, for what van Inwagen meant by this

comparison). Furthermore, throughout his book (e.g. pp. 1, 99, 107, 213), van Inwagen uses

language like ‘there are no chairs’ to state his eliminativist position. This shows that van

Inwagen must recognize a meaning of ‘chairs’ for which ‘chairs’ refers to the type of chair that

he maintains does not exist, as opposed to atoms arranged chairwise. However, van Inwagen

believes that despite the intuition that terms like ‘chair’ mean single objects, the concept of a

single object is not built into the meaning of words like ‘chair’. Perhaps the way to understand

van Inwagen’s position that the concept of a single object is not built into the term ‘chair’ despite

an intuition to the contrary is that van Inwagen believes that the intuition is not that strong and

conclusive, but only somewhat of an intuition.

However—and here I return to the question of what the folk believe—although van Inwagen

compares talk of chairs to talk of the sun moving, I think he never meant to compare

Copernicans saying ‘the sun moved’ to the folk saying ‘there are two chairs’. In the Preface of

his book (pp. 1-2), van Inwagen clearly made the comparison between the folk talking about

chairs to the folk at the time of Copernicus, who were non-Copernicans, talking about the sun

9
moving (which again shows that van Inwagen believes that the folk’s beliefs are inconsistent

with eliminativism). I therefore think that in the passage that Merricks (p. 164) quoted from van

Inwagen (pp. 101–2) where van Inwagen compared the sentence ‘the sun moved behind the

elms’ as uttered by himself, a Copernican (and therefore meant loosely) to the sentence ‘there are

two very valuable chairs in the next room’, van Inwagen meant to compare the sentence about

the sun moving to the sentence about the chairs also as uttered by an eliminativist like himself,

and van Inwagen’s point was that when eliminativists speak about chairs they speak loosely.

(However, in van Inwagen’s view, talk about chairs existing and talk about the sun moving are

both true (if they describe true facts) not only when uttered by eliminativists and Copernicans, in

which case they are meant loosely, but even when uttered by non-eliminativists and

non-Copernicans, because the false beliefs that are presupposed in the background of these

expressions that there are chairs that are single objects and that the sun really orbits the earth are

not part of the meaning of the expressions). Alternatively, if in the passage Merricks (p. 164)

quoted, van Inwagen (pp. 101–2) did mean to compare ‘the sun moved behind the elms’ as

uttered by himself to ‘there are two very valuable chairs in the next room’ as uttered by an

ordinary person, van Inwagen must have meant that to the extent that ‘chair’ does carry the

connotation of a single object (as I said above that I think van Inwagen agrees that to a certain

extent ‘chair’ carries the connotation of a single object but not to the extent that this connotation

becomes the meaning of the word) we see the non-eliminativist as unknowingly speaking loosely

when he uses the term ‘chair’.

Van Inwagen’s views, both his denial that there are chairs and his maintaining that nevertheless

‘there are two chairs’ is true (if in fact there are), are perhaps made most clear with his analogy

to the imaginary story of the bligers (p. 104). Bligers appear to be black tigers when seen in the

10
distance and are believed by the folk to be so. However, they are in fact six different animals that

only look like a single animal from far. It is obvious that the folk believe falsely that bligers are

single beings.6 Still, van Inwagen argues, the folk do not speak falsely when they say ‘there are

bligers’ because ‘bliger’ describes a real phenomenon (in the story), and the understanding of

‘bliger’ as a single animal is not built into the meaning of the word. Van Inwagen concludes:

‘What I mean by saying that there are no chairs is precisely analogous to what I mean by saying

that there are no bligers’ (p. 104). Again, with this analogy van Inwagen makes it clear that he

believes that the folk’s beliefs are inconsistent with eliminativism (similar to their belief (in the

story) that bligers are single animals). However, the false belief that bligers or chairs are single

beings does not become built into the meaning of the terms to render ordinary expressions that

describe true facts about the world false.

What did van Inwagen mean then by the title of §10 that eliminativism ‘does not contradict our

ordinary beliefs’? If he merely meant that eliminativism is consistent with Universal Belief (see

what I cited above from van Inwagen, p.103), this would make for a poor title, since van

Inwagen covered much more than Universal Belief in §10. As I discussed, van Inwagen’s main

point (in §10) is that eliminativism is consistent with ordinary language. I therefore think that by

‘our ordinary beliefs’ van Inwagen is referring to beliefs unrelated to philosophy. Namely, that

our day to day beliefs about objects, like the proposition one believes and expresses when telling

a friend that there are two valuable chairs in the next room is (in van Inwagen’s view) consistent

with eliminativism because that proposition is separable from her false philosophical belief about

the metaphysics of chairs which she rarely if ever expresses. Since these ordinary beliefs are

6
The folk are mistaken about the bligers based on their ignorance of an empirical fact. Still from the point of view of
how they ever encounter bligers, the bligers always appear to be single beings. This case is not necessarily
fundamentally different from the folk ontology about chairs. From the folk’s point of view, a chair is a single being,
but in reality, it is just a collection of atoms (separated by empty space).

11
what underlie all the expressions about those beliefs, pointing out that those beliefs are consistent

with eliminativism perfectly covers the main point of §10.

In conclusion, Merricks’s view is that terms like ‘chair’ (unlike grammatically similar terms like

‘crew’) essentially mean single beings, and propositions about them (expressed or merely

believed) are therefore false according to eliminativism. This view is the simple and

straightforward view that emerges from eliminativism. However, there is something unsettling

about this view. The false (according to the eliminativist) belief about the metaphysics of a chair,

although present in the background of every non-philosophical proposition believed or expressed

about chairs by non-eliminativists is irrelevant to the specific proposition since ‘chair’ doesn’t

have to refer to anything non-existent; it could refer to whatever actually does exist, namely

atoms arranged chairwise. As Merricks says (p. 186), even he talks just like the folk about

inanimate objects whenever he is not working, and surely he does so even when talking to other

eliminativists (unless he is being humorous). It is thus unattractive to say that every parochial

belief or expression that except for the irrelevant underlying metaphysics is true that was ever

held/expressed by any non-eliminativist is a falsehood. Van Inwagen therefore holds that

propositions about chairs, for example, should be taken to refer to the atoms arranged chairwise

and are therefore true if they express true facts. As Merricks and van Inwagen make it clear, their

dispute also extends to other cases like non-Copernicans talking about the sun moving. Merricks

misunderstood van Inwagen’s point and thought that van Inwagen was saying that ordinary

people’s beliefs are consistent with eliminativism, while van Inwagen only said that their

‘ordinary’ non-philosophical beliefs and expressions are consistent with eliminativism. I think

that Van Inwagen’s view is an interesting alternative to Merrick’s.

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References

Merricks, T. (2001). Objects and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Inwagen, P. (1990). Material Beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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