Why metaphysical debates are not merely verbal (or how to have a non-verbal metaphysical debate)

Abstract

A number of philosophers have argued in recent years that certain kinds of metaphysical debates—e.g., debates over the existence of past and future objects, mereological sums, and coincident objects—are merely verbal. (Roughly speaking, a merely verbal dispute is one in which the two parties to the dispute don’t disagree about any non-verbal facts and only seem to disagree because they mean different things by their words.) It is argued in this paper that metaphysical debates (of a certain very broad kind) are not merely verbal. The paper proceeds by uncovering and describing a pattern that can be found in a very wide range of philosophical problems and then explaining how, in connection with any problem of this general kind, there is always a non-verbal debate to be had. Indeed, the paper provides a recipe for locating the non-verbal debates that surround these philosophical problems. This undermines metametaphysical verbalist views of our metaphysical questions—i.e., views that say that there is no non-verbal debate to be had about some metaphysical question. Finally, the paper also provides a quick argument against actual-literature verbalist views of our metaphysical questions; in other words, the paper argues that in connection with all of our metaphysical questions, it is easy to find examples of non-verbal debates in the actual philosophical literature.