Be careful with things!
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings.” ‒ Lewis Carroll
In my previous post, I agreed that you can’t explain why a kind of thing has instances at all unless you cite the activity of something not belonging to that kind. Yet I also claimed that you can explain why contingent things exist without citing the activity of anything noncontingent, because “contingent thing” doesn’t denote a kind of thing. Here I give two reasons why it doesn’t.
Lewis Carroll’s line at the top identifies five paradigm kinds of things. The instances of all five kinds share at least two important features. Take ships, for example. First, not every part of a ship is a ship. Second, no two ships occupy exactly the same space at the same time. Likewise with the other four kinds. Now, “sealing wax” is a mass noun, but even so: Not every part of sealing wax is sealing wax (some parts are carbon atoms), and no two quantities of sealing wax occupy exactly the same space at the same time. I say that these two features characterize all instances of genuine kinds.*
By contrast, every part of any contingent thing is itself a contingent thing. Any ship and its parts are all contingent things, as are any quantity of sealing wax and its parts. Moreover, two contingent things can occupy exactly the same space at the same time, such as a statue and the lump of clay that constitutes it. So contingent things aren’t a kind of thing; instead, contingent things belong to various kinds.
These examples teach a general lesson. You don’t pick out a genuine kind by taking “things” and modifying it with some adjective, such as “red,” “physical,” “contingent,” or even “human.” As Amie Thomasson notes, much philosophical mischief can result from the sloppy use of “things,” “objects,” “entities,” and the like. While the nouns “human,” “human being,” and “Homo sapiens” all name a kind, the noun “human thing” doesn’t. If it has a meaning, “human thing” picks out a heterogeneous collection that includes human beings, human artifacts, and human foibles.
* In his forthcoming book, Andrew Brenner objects that two quantum bosons can occupy the same space at the same time, as can two fields. But the quantum orthodoxy he cites says that precise position eigenstates are never physically realizable for bosons or fields, in which case those eigenstates never perfectly coincide.
