Partially Equivalent Metaphysical Theories

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss the case of a metaphysical debate that has been the target and centre of interest for many of those who work on meta-metaphysics, namely the problem of how objects persist through time: the endurantism versus perdurantism controversy. Some have argued, for various reasons, that this debate is a good example of a merely verbal one, where two allegedly competing views are in fact translatable one into the other—they end up, contrary to appearances, to be equivalent. In my discussion, I conclude that this is correct, but only to some extent, and that there does remain room for substantive disagreement. The second thing that I wish to achieve in this chapter is to start to defend a metaontological view that emphasizes a point which I think is often taken and acknowledged by many of those who are involved in metaontology, but which is not so often explicitly defended, namely that when asking the question “Are metaphysical debates substantive or verbal?” the correct answer is “It depends." Some debates are substantive, some debates are merely verbal, sometimes it is true that a problem or a question can be formulated in equally good frameworks where there is no fact of the matter as to which one is correct or where we just cannot know it. Furthermore, importantly, as my examination of the persistence debate will show, there is room for the view that such a debate is largely merely verbal but not entirely and that some parts of it are substantive, and decidable by philosophical methods. It is possible, and it is the case with respect to the persistence debate, that inside a debate some points are merely verbal while other are places of substantive disagreement. A moral of this is that, at the end of the day, the best way to do meta-metaphysics is to do first-level metaphysics.