Shieva Kleinschmidt [This version differs from the Phil Studies ... - Usc

atoms, and atoms are themselves not made of stuff, it seems that all talk of stuff can be
reduced to talk of things. 16
Another way to respond to my argument is to deny the existence of a sum of the
portions of atom-constituting stuff in region r (rejecting premise 4). 17 This requires
denying that for any two portions of stuff, there is a sum of those portions. However, this
will not help to avoid colocation in all cases. For instance, consider a Revised Oatmeal
Case: Suppose I am particularly ravenous one morning, and eat all but one oat flake of
my breakfast. We’d want to say that I’ve still got some oatmeal left (exactly located in
the region which is exactly occupied by the oat), and of course we still want to say that
there is oat-stuff there (also exactly located in the same region as the oat). But, even
without appealing to sums, this gives us colocation of distinct portions of stuff. Thus, the
no-sums response to the water case will not be helpful in all cases to avoid the problem of
colocation that results from our allowing constitution to go both ways.
Once again, one might respond to this case by denying that the oat-stuff and the
oatmeal are distinct. But I think there’s a more fundamental worry about the anti-sums
response to my argument. The principle that for any portions of stuff, there’s a sum of
those portions, is very intuitive. If we’re to reject it, we need a reason to. I fail to see a
reason. It’s especially hard to see why one would reject that there’s a sum of the portions
in my case; I’m not asking us to sum portions on opposite ends of the galaxy, or to sum
portions of radically differing stuff kinds. At the very least, more would need to be said
to make this response at all appealing.
There are also a couple of ways to attempt to deny that the matter and the water
are distinct (rejecting premise 7). One way is to deny that there are ever two stuff kinds
instantiated in exactly the same region 18 . Michael Burke’s view has this result. Burke
posits stuff only when the mass term in question refers to a homeomerous entity 19 (stuff
of which every subportion is a portion of the same kind of stuff 20 ). Because the water has
16
This point was suggested in conversation by Ned Markosian.
17
This option, if successful, would help not only with this case but also with the revised water case, which
is presented later in the paper.
18
This would involve rejecting another premise in addition to premise 7 – such as 1 and 2, or 3, or 4.
19
Burke, “Coinciding Objects: Reply to Lowe and Denkel.”
20
Zimmerman, “Coincident Objects: Could a ‘Stuff Ontology’ Help?” p. 19. Zimmerman’s account of
homeomerous stuff is as follows: “K is a homeomerous stuff =df Every mass x of K is such that every part
of x has a complete decomposition into a set of masses of K” (Zimmerman, “Theories of Masses and