ABSTRACT
The most problematic objection to Substantial Priority stems from the empirical worry that the view fails to capture the fundamental causal activity of what appear to be substantial proper parts of composite substances. The instantiation of a particular power-distribution by a substance guarantees that the substance will have a certain distribution of causal powers among its proper sub-regions, whether biological, chemical, physical, or perhaps psychological. The correctness of ordinary and scientific assertions (in contrast to those uttered in the ontology room we might say) is insensitive to the truth of particular metaphysical positions in fundamental mereology. The application of localized tropes to the objection against Substantial Priority is straightforward. This move allows the defender of Substantial Priority to attribute all of the fundamental joint-carving causal properties to the substance as a whole without relying on the machinery of distributional properties.
