Resolving the Puzzles: Plasticity and Plenitude

Abstract

This chapter develops a strategy for resolving Tolerance Puzzles based on two central ideas. The first idea is a principle of ‘plenitude’, according to which any given material objects coincides with innumerably many others differing from it in a wide variety of modal respects. The second idea is that because of this plenitude of candidate referents, the singular terms (like ‘this table’) and common nouns (like ‘table’) that feature in Tolerance Puzzles are subject to a high degree of semantic plasticity: small changes in the world, e.g. in the selection of parts to be made into tables, suffice to make a difference to what we refer to with these words. Such plasticity undermines the Security Argument for Non-contingency developed in chapter 2, by suggesting that even though Tolerance could easily have been false, Tolerance speeches robustly express truths.