Against Parthood∗ - Ted Sider

English, but rather are to mean something perfectly fundamental, albeit with a
similar inferential role”. 32
In light of this section, then, we should reformulate nihilism as the view
that in the fundamental sense, there are no composite entities. 33
4. Mooreanism again
Mooreanism assumes that inconsistency with common sense makes an epistemic
difference. Common sense consists of propositions believed by ordinary
people; and the propositions that ordinary people believe are those expressed
by ordinary sentences. In the case at hand, these are ordinary sentences like
‘there are tables’. So according to Mooreanism, in order to decide whether
to accept nihilism, we must ascertain whether nihilism allows such ordinary
sentences to be true. If it does then it passes the Moorean test, and we have no
common-sense-based reason to reject it. But if nihilism prohibits their truth
(albeit allowing their correctness), then it fails the Moorean test, and we have
our common-sense-based reason to reject nihilism.
Whether nihilism allows these sentences to be true turns on a difficult issue
32 See Sider (2013).
33 The language of this formulation cannot be a perfectly fundamental one since it contains
‘composite’, which is defined in terms of ‘part’. The language must instead be a mixed one, with
fundamental quantifiers but nonfundamental predicates. But there are arguments purporting
to show that all such languages are suspect (see my 2007a, section 2.7 and 2011, section 9.6.1).
Also, in this mixed language, ‘part’ might be semantically empty, since it might have no suitable
basis in the fundamental. (Entire sentences containing ‘part’ in the language of the minions can
be given a basis in the fundamental, but that language’s quantifiers are not fundamental.) The
latter concern could be addressed by making the claim metalinguistic: “‘there are composites’
is not true”. This is an improvement but doesn’t capture the form of nihilism discussed at the
very end of the paper, which identifies ordinary objects with sets: on this view, ordinary objects
like tables and chairs do exist in the fundamental sense (since they’re sets), and they satisfy the
nonfundamental predicate ‘composite’ (their “parts” are their subsets). So perhaps we should
return to a perfectly fundamental language, give up on a general formulation of nihilism, and
instead formulate particular nihilistic ontologies, such as “Everything is a fundamental particle”,
“Everything is a point of spacetime”, “Everything is either a point of spacetime or a set”, and so
on. (These formulations must be cleaned up since ‘point of spacetime’, ‘fundamental particle’,
and ‘set’ are probably not fundamental predicates. The third one, for example, can be cleaned
up as follows: “There is exactly one thing that has no members but is not a member of any
open thing [this is the null set]; everything else either has a member [and so is a set], or is a
member of some open thing [and so is a point of spacetime]”.)
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