Against Parthood∗ - Ted Sider

hilism would be to take a stand on this hard issue, argue for a liberal conception
of when ordinary sentences are true in a hostile metaphysical environment, and
conclude that nihilism doesn’t after all conflict with common sense. 36 But this
is not how I want to respond to the Moorean argument (though I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that the liberal conception is right). My response is rather
that what we say about the hard issue cannot possibly have the epistemic significance
that Mooreanism requires it to have. The question of when Eddingtonian
views are true is of no deep epistemic importance; so the important question of
whether it’s reasonable to believe nihilism can’t turn on how we resolve it; so
Mooreanism can’t be right.
It’s an interesting question whether Eddington was right that the ordinary
sentence ‘tables are solid’ is falsified by modern atomic theory. But how we
resolve this question surely carries no weight when one is deciding whether to
believe modern atomic theory. It is intuitively clear that, rather than using our
prior beliefs about whether tables are solid to decide what to believe about the
atomic theory, we ought instead to decide on independent grounds whether the
atomic theory is correct, and whether Eddington was right about the connection
between the atomic theory and solidity; and we ought then to use our answers
to those questions to decide whether to believe that tables are solid.
The Eddingtonian question is that of how much “metasemantic tolerance”
there is—how much error there can be in our ordinary conception of a term
before paradigmatic sentences containing the term become false. Its answer
lies in metasemantics, in how semantic facts are determined. Consider how
we determine how much metasemantic tolerance there is. We think about our
reactions to Eddington’s argument, and our reactions to metasemantic thought
experiments (like: if the things we think are cats were discovered to be robots,
would they still be rightly called ‘cats’? (Putnam, 1962)) Surely our reactions
to these thought experiments carry no weight when it comes to deciding what
to believe about the atomic theory, or about nihilism.
It might be objected that my argument illegitimately semantically ascends.
I construed the Moorean as demanding consistency with the truth of certain
sentences. But, it might be claimed, what she demands is rather consistency with
my having a hand, with the existence of tables, with murder being wrong…. If
so, Mooreanism does not concern sentential truth, and so, it may be thought,
Mooreanism does not make epistemic value depend on metasemantics.
This response is like the fig-leaf maneuver at the end of section 2. Moore-
36 Cameron (2010b) and perhaps van Inwagen (1990, chapter 10) take this approach.
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