Relación existente entre el modelo del sistema productivo y el consumo de

As Sosa describes, in The Many Faces of Realism, I used the following example (I quote Sosa’s pre sen ta tion of the example, which is quite accurate):²⁸

Suppose a world with just three individuals x1, x2, x3. Such a world is held by some “mereologists” to have in it a total of seven things or entities or objects, namely, x1, x2, x3, x1 + x2, x1 + x3, x2 + x3, x1 + x2 + x3. Antimereologists by contrast prefer the more austere ontology that recognizes only the three individuals as objects that really exist in that world. Talk of the existence of x1 + x2 and its ilk is just con ve nient abbreviation of a more complex discourse that refers to nothing but individuals. Thus, suppose x1 is wholly red and x2 is wholly black. And consider

1. There is an object that is partly red and partly black.

2. There is an object that is red and an object that is black.

For the antimereologist, statement 1 is not true, if we assume that x3 is also wholly red or wholly black; it is at best a con ve nient way of abbreviating the likes of 2.

Sosa goes on to quote my response (which, as he correctly points out, was in agreement with Carnap’s views on similar questions), namely, that “the question is one of the choice of a language. On some days it may be more con ve nient to use [antimereological] lan-guage: . . . on other days it may be con ve nient to use [mereological]

language.”²⁹

Explaining this answer, Sosa writes:³⁰ Take the question,

How many objects with a volume of at least 6 cubic centimeters are there in this container?

28. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 614.

29. The quotation is from my “Truth and Convention: On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Relativism,” in Dialectica 41 (1987): 69–77; quotation from p. 75.

30. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 614–615.

This question can have no absolute answer on the Carnap- Putnam view, even in a case where the container contains a vacuum except for three marbles each with a volume of 6 cubic centimeters. The antimereologist may say

3. There are three objects in the box.

But the mereologist will reply

4. There are at least seven objects in the box.

The Carnap- Putnam line is now this: which statement we accept—3 or 4— is a matter of linguistic con ve nience. The language of mereology has criteria of existence and identity according to which sums of individuals are objects. The language of antimere-ology rejects such criteria, and may even claim that by its criteria only individuals are objects.

Sosa begins the fi rst of his criticisms with the following words: “ There is a valuable insight here, I believe, but I am puzzled by the linguistic wrapping in which it is offered.”³¹

After saying “I am puzzled by the linguistic wrapping,” Sosa continues,

After all, none of 1–4 mentions any language, or any piece of lan-guage, nor does any of them say we shall or shall not or should or should not use any language or bit of language. So I do not see how our decision actually to use or not to use any or all of the sentences 1–4 can settle the question of whether what these sentences say is true or false.

My reply to this objection is that what settles the question whether what these sentences say is true or false is not merely our decision to use (assert?) any or all of them, but our adoption of what Sosa himself called

“the criteria of existence and identity” of mereology or “the criteria of

31. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 615. However, there is one (possibly quite con-sequential) change I would make in the above explanation of “the Carnap- Putnam line”: in the last sentence, I would change the last clause to read “and may even claim that by its criteria there are no such objects as the ‘sums’ x1 + x2, x1 + x3, x2 + x3, x1 + x2 + x3.”

existence and identity” of antimereology, together with certain empirical facts. The way that works is as follows: if the Eiffel Tower does not exist (and that, I agree with Sosa, is not a question with re spect to which there is any “conceptual relativity”) or if the Statue of Liberty does not exist (ditto), then the mereological sum of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty also does not exist (no matter which of the criteria we adopt). But if they do both exist, then if we adopt the mereological criteria of existence and iden-tity, then we have adopted conventions of language that make it trivially correct to say that the mereological sum of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty exist. The example itself was meant to illustrate precisely how there can be a choice between dif fer ent uses of “exist,” on some of which it is true to say that mereological sums exist, while on others it is false.

[“But Hilary, how can you talk of conventions after Quine?” I can imagine my old friend Burton Dreben (and not only Burton Dreben) exclaiming. The answer here, as I explained long ago,³² is that while I fi nd the notion of convention indispensable, I do not explain it in terms of the Carnapian notion of “analyticity.” What is and what is not a matter of convention is something on which we may change our minds, and empirical facts may turn out to be relevant. But I do not agree with Quine that the notion is simply to be discarded.]

Perhaps anticipating some such response, Sosa immediately suggests that a linguistic formulation of the doctrine of conceptual relativity would render it trivial. He writes:

Here for a start is a possibility [i.e., a pos si ble interpretation]:

LR1. In order to say anything you must adopt a language. So you must “adopt a meaning” even for so basic a term as “object.” And you might have adopted another. Thus you might adopt Carnap- language (CL) or you might adopt Polish- logician language (PL).

What you say, i.e., the utterances you make, the sentences you affi rm, are not true or false absolutely, but are true or false only rel-ative to a given language. Thus, if you say “ There are three objects in this box” your utterance or sentence may be true understood as a statement of CL while it is false understood as a statement in PL.³³

32. See Hilary Putnam, “Convention, a Theme in Philosophy,” in Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 170–183.

33. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 615.

But under this interpretation linguistic relativity seems trivially true.

Who could deny that inscriptions of shapes and emissions of sounds are not true or false in de pen dently of their meaning, in de pen dently of all relativization to language or idiolect?

My reply to this consists of three points:

1. The speaker of, say, PL does not do anything that would ordi-narily be called giving (or “adopting”) a meaning to the word

“object” (if this is not clear, substitute “entity”). When he says that there are such objects (or such entities) as mereological sums, he counts, at least for linguistic purposes, as simply using

“object” (“entity”) in the normal (Anglo- American) way. So the trivial linguistic truth that the truth- value of our utterances depends on the meanings we give to their words (or that our linguistic community has already given them) is not the same as the thesis of conceptual relativity that I affi rmed above, unless

“meaning” is already being given a special philosophical interpretation.

2. To see that it is not trivially true that if we adopt CL we thereby make “ There are seven objects in the box Sosa described [the one with 3 marbles in a vacuum]” true, consider the question from the standpoint of a metaphysical realist who does not believe in the existence of mereological sums. (I called him “Professor Antipode” in The Many Faces of Realism.) Obviously Professor Antipode will say something like this: “I don’t mind your saying that when you use the word ‘object’ you mean to include mereo-logical sums as objects. But that doesn’t make ‘Mereomereo-logical sums exist’ true, any more than saying ‘When I use the word

“object” I mean to include leprechauns’ makes ‘Leprechauns exist’ true.”

3. On the other hand, according to my own unmetaphysical sort of realism, adopting the conventions of PL does make it true to say (in PL) “Mereological sums exist,” and adopting the conventions of (CL) makes it true to say “Only three objects exist” [in the relevant world], and a fortiori that mereological sums do not exist. Whether I am right in this claim or not is not an instance of trivial linguistic conventionality, as Professor Antipode’s argument shows.