ABSTRACT
Common-sense ontology—commitment, in everyday talk and thought, to such entities as tigers and tables and baseballs and gloves, and perhaps even to pairs of gloves—serves pretty well. Trenton Merricks argues, however, that—except in the case of conscious composite objects, which he thinks do exist—common-sense ontology is mistaken. There are no tigers or tables or baseballs or gloves; there are merely smaller things arranged tiger-wise, glove-wise, and so on. Merricks's argument that have no ordinary grounds for believing in ordinary objects, such as gloves, depends on the claim that have no ordinary grounds for believing in objects that are wholly causally redundant. Beast, if it exists, causes a lot of things: it causes changes in the couch's location; it causes the scales to register over three hundred pounds; it causes to experience its wild leaping; and much else besides.
