locutions that it is implausible to regard as existentially committing.
Those who reject nobodies, differences, whereabouts, and lacks are not at all at odds with common sense. Even common sense is aware that you cant immediately read off our ontological commit- ments from the surface grammar of ordinary language. Drawing the analogous existential conclusions from these results in sentences that sound absurdthere are nobodies, nothings, and inections. Getting from a truism to an absurdity in just one quick step is an indication that something has gone wrong. The fact that people are so willing to assert these sentences, yet so hesitant to assent to the obvious existential implications is a sign that something is wrong. We have no such hesitation about the shoes, the ofces, and the book. While its true that were not logically omniscient it is remarkable that, in such cases, many are unwill- ing to commit to the existence of things that are immediately entailed by their common-sense beliefs. The nominalist can say of course there are such things as tables and chairs and elec- trons and not raise the ordinary folks hackles. His opponents cannot. Finally, reason itself gives us reason to distrust the commitments of ordinary language. Consider holes. For all the ink thats been spilled on them, it is a mistake to think that, as well as the bucket, theres such a thing as a hole in the bucket. Its not that, as a mad- dog nominalist, I have an aversion to holes. After all, it seems that holes are spatio-temporally located: the hole is located in the bucket. A believer in holes can make the case that his holes have causal powers: its because of the hole that the bucket leaks. Moreover, our talk of holes seems to meet many of the relevant linguistic criteria. Its natural for us to existentially quantify over holes: theres a hole in the bucket. Were capable of counting holes: there are ve in the bucket. There are true statements about holes involving their identity or distinctness: theres a new hole in the bucket that wasnt there yesterday. We can ascribe properties to holes: the new hole is at least smaller than the old holes. We can generalize about holes: most of the holes in the bucket are small. It may even be good theoretical practice in physics to reason about the behaviour of the holes rather than the background stuff in which the holes have formed, for the resulting theory may be simpler and more tractable in certain ways.
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