Abstract Summary
Elizabeth Miller (Yale University) - In their theorizing about the world, two groups of philosophers give starring roles to basic local concreta—objects arrayed in space-time or, if we prefer, points or (bounded) regions of space-time itself bearing intrinsic states (of “occupation” or other material decoration). In a debate about the metaphysics of laws of nature, Humeans maintain that all nomological (and other) facts about the world supervene on the spatiotemporal distribution of some metaphysically basic local qualities. In a debate about the demands of empirical coherence on physical theories, primitive ontologists insist that an adequate physical theory must directly describe some fundamental local beables, constituents of the familiar macroscopic landscape that figures centrally in our empirical data about the world. Members of both groups agree that we need some basis of local concreta to metaphysically explain some “derivative” facts about or features of the world, but why don’t they agree about more? A comparatively boring hypothesis emphasizes that the two groups start out with different work for their basic local concreta to do: primitive ontologists want their base of local beables to account for some fairly limited data, facts about the actual configuration of macroscopic objects, while Humeans want their mosaic of local qualities to metaphysically suffice for all facts about the world, including facts about what actually is not but—in some physical sense—could have been the case. Perhaps, then, they agree entirely about the role of local concreta in accounting for some limited data but go on to disagree, more or less independently, about what reality, especially modal reality, beyond such data is like. I explore a more interesting hypothesis, which suggests a deeper tension between Humeanism and primitivism: at the core of primitivism is a general constraint on metaphysical explanation at odds with the Humean worldview. Specifically, Humeanism incorporates distinctive violation of a local screening off (LSO) condition: the basic local concreta within a part of space-time metaphysically explain, and so screen off, its local physical state from happenings elsewhere in space-time.
