Coincidence and Principles of Composition

Abstract

1. On a widely favoured view of material objects,1 two objects could be made of the very same matter at the same time, and instances abound. Here's the familiar fable. A copper statue of Hermes is fashioned (say, all at once by nuclear fusion so that none of its matter or at any rate, none of its copper precedes it), and later entirely dissolved in acid. The statue and the piece of copper formed and destroyed in this process are, it is said, distinct objects, despite being wholly coincident. For the two differ in (e.g.) their dispositional or modal properties. The statue, unlike the piece of copper, could not survive a radical change in shape. So, the statue and the piece of copper are discernible and therefore distinct; and they share all their matter they coincide.2 The lesson of this fable: Distinct material objects, such as statues and statue-shaped pieces of matter, can coincide. Or so say the widely favoured view's advocates. But there are, of course, dissenters, and, up to a point, I side with them.3 I wish to discern two elements within the widely favoured view, only the second of which, it seems to me, is wrong. First, there is the doctrine that coincidence of distinct material objects is possible; call this 'the doctrine of coincidents'. Second, there is the claim that coinciding objects fall under sorts whose instances such as the statue and the piece of copper abound in ordinary experience. In this paper I raise a serious puzzle facing the doctrine of coincidents, and construct a novel solution to it. The style of that solution turns out to be quite uncongenial to the second element of the favoured view,