The Constitution Question

Abstract

Michelangelo's David is constituted by a particular chunk of marble.The flag that hangs at the nearby courthouse is constituted by a piece of fabric.I am constituted by my body.This much is familiar.But what is the relation of constitution at work in these various cases?In this paper I propose to address this question as it arises for one particular metaphysical view, what is sometimes called the constitution view.The defender of the constitution view makes three important claims.First, objects of the common sense ontology exist.So, for example, there are lumps of clay, human bodies, statues and persons. 1 Second, these objects have the sorts of de re modal properties and persistence conditions that common sense attributes to them. 2 Lumps of clay, for example, can survive being squashed, while statues cannot.Third, the defender of the constitution view claims that constitution is not identity.The idea that constitution is not identity follows quite naturally from the previous two assumptions.For consider a particular statue that is constituted by an ordinary lump of clay.Given the first assumption above, the constitution theorist recognizes the existence of the statue and the lump and, given the second, the constitution theorist claims that these objects differ in their de re modal properties.The constitution theorist concludes that, despite the fact that the statue and the lump stand in a very intimate relationship, they are nonetheless distinct.3 The constitution view is a natural one.It is also quite popular, having been defended by Lynne Rudder Baker (1997,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 109 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.