106 Joseph Melia

locutions that it is implausible to regard as existentially committing.

Those who reject nobodies, differences, whereabouts, and lacks are
not at all at odds with common sense. Even common sense is
aware that you cant immediately read off our ontological commit-
ments from the surface grammar of ordinary language. Drawing
the analogous existential conclusions from these results in sentences
that sound absurdthere are nobodies, nothings, and inections.
Getting from a truism to an absurdity in just one quick step
is an indication that something has gone wrong. The fact that
people are so willing to assert these sentences, yet so hesitant
to assent to the obvious existential implications is a sign that
something is wrong. We have no such hesitation about the shoes,
the ofces, and the book. While its true that were not logically
omniscient it is remarkable that, in such cases, many are unwill-
ing to commit to the existence of things that are immediately
entailed by their common-sense beliefs. The nominalist can say
of course there are such things as tables and chairs and elec-
trons and not raise the ordinary folks hackles. His opponents
cannot.
Finally, reason itself gives us reason to distrust the commitments
of ordinary language. Consider holes. For all the ink thats been
spilled on them, it is a mistake to think that, as well as the bucket,
theres such a thing as a hole in the bucket. Its not that, as a mad-
dog nominalist, I have an aversion to holes. After all, it seems that
holes are spatio-temporally located: the hole is located in the bucket.
A believer in holes can make the case that his holes have causal
powers: its because of the hole that the bucket leaks. Moreover, our
talk of holes seems to meet many of the relevant linguistic criteria.
Its natural for us to existentially quantify over holes: theres a hole
in the bucket. Were capable of counting holes: there are ve in
the bucket. There are true statements about holes involving their
identity or distinctness: theres a new hole in the bucket that wasnt
there yesterday. We can ascribe properties to holes: the new hole is
at least smaller than the old holes. We can generalize about holes:
most of the holes in the bucket are small. It may even be good
theoretical practice in physics to reason about the behaviour of the
holes rather than the background stuff in which the holes have
formed, for the resulting theory may be simpler and more tractable
in certain ways.