Ontology Without Borders by Jody Azzouni (review)

Although this book is not about a group of metaphysicians who travel the globe administering cost-free cures of philosophical illnesses, its purpose can still be seen as therapeutic: it proposes a way to deal with the fact that philosophers have never been able to figure out what objects and properties are. "When we analyze the ideas, we run up against perennial puzzles. Running up against perennial puzzles is what always happens when we're in the presence of a myth." The prescription is, so to speak, amputation of a phantom limb: we need to accept that while features are out there in the world, objects are not: the borders that, as we suppose, demarcate one object from another are, in fact, lines drawn by us. This metaphysical thesis, "object projectivism," is developed subsequent to the development of a logico-linguistic thesis, "quantifier neutralism," which says (roughly) that our uses of quantifiers don't force us to accept the reality of any objects.

Beginning with a general introduction, and concluding with a general conclusion, the book is divided into two parts: "Ontological Commitment" (mostly about quantifier neutralism) and "What There Is" (mostly about object projectivism). There isn't space here to go into all the many details, but here is an important thread from part 1: For Azzouni, ontological debates are real, not only for philosophers but also for nonphilosophers. Each side is able to take the other side seriously, which means not only that existence-talk should not be deflated away or relativized to a language, but also that we can talk about things without committing ourselves to their real existence. None of this is meant to prove object projectivism, but only to remove a class of arguments against it, namely, that such-and-such (putative) objects are indispensable for our talk; therefore, they exist in the world.

In part 2, we meet object projectivism itself, which holds that nothing in the world–not properties, not relations, not brute facts—grounds the individuation of objects. Differences and samenesses among objects, across space, time, or worlds—these are all projections, projections resulting from psychological mechanisms and linguistic practices. Why think this? Well, object individuation is either primitive, or it is grounded in properties and relations. Azzouni rejects the former as offering no metaphysical account at all. He rejects the latter on the grounds that neither of the two available routes for grounding object-individuation in properties and relations—the route that departs from how we experience the world, and the route that departs from what's required by the one best theory—works. We do experience the world as containing individuated objects, but we have no good reason for supposing that our experience tracks real differences and samenesses. We don't have a one best theory, but even if we did, there is no good reason to suppose that its quantifiers would quantify over real objects: the (distributions of) properties and relations in the theory would do all the work. And the point isn't merely that we could cut the objects away with Ockham's razor: "[W]e can't make sense of ontological borders as additional bits of metaphysical landscape, above and beyond feature distributions."

To speak (as I just did) of distributions of properties and relations is, on Azzouni's way of thinking, misleading; properties and relations are of objects, and further, they can be individuated, as if they were themselves objects of a sort. For that reason, Azzouni holds that when we abandon objects, we abandon properties and relations as well, and are left with "features" instead. Embracing object projectivism also leads to abandoning predication in favor of a "feature-placing language." What there is, then, is "the feature presentation." We can choose some aspects of it to serve as a coordinate system on the basis of which we can say which features are placed "where," but how we do this is not a matter of obligation—we can say which colors are at which spaces...