Unwilling to adopt the radical ontologies that leading answers to van Inwagen's special composition question imply, Ned Markosian proposes that there is no true, non-trivial, and finitely long answer to the SCQ. On my usage, this makes Markosian a particularist about composition. I argue that an improved version of Markosian's particularism fails because it cannot explain how sense perception justifies many of the ordinary-object beliefs we base on it. I further argue that psychologists' research on object perception suggests that general (...) principles govern how we perceptually discriminate unified wholes from mere pluralities, and this narrows the range of answers to the SCQ available to commonsense ontologists. (shrink)

Proponents of supervaluationism claim super-truth, i. e., truth on every admissible precisification, is identical to truth or, at least, is a suitable truth proxy. I object that super-truth is neither identical to nor a suitable proxy for truth. I argue that to claim a statement is super-true is simply to maintain that a certain counterfactual holds, and that a claim is true, counterfactually, is no reason to treat it as true. I further argue that, with super-truth undermined, Roy Sorensen’s objection (...) that supervaluationism cannot accommodate vague directly referential terms presents supervaluationism’s defenders with a significant challenge. (shrink)