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Two main claims are defended in this paper: first, that typical disputes in the literature about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal; second, that the proper way to resolve these disputes is by appealing to common sense or ordinary language. A verbal dispute is characterized not in terms of private idiolects. but in terms of different linguistic communities representing different positions. If we imagine a community that makes Chisholm's mereological essentialist assertions, and another community that makes Lewis's four-dimensionalist assertions, the members of each community speak the truth in their respective languages. This follows from an application of the principle of interpretive charity to the two communities.' Rudolph Camap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956).PHYSICAL-OBJECT ONTOLOGY, VERBAL DISPUTES, AND COMMON SENSE 67 physical-object ontology, that all sides to a dispute have at their disposal constructions involving sets (or properties).Questions about the ontology of physical objects have been prominent in the recent literature. Some of the doctrines that have been most frequently debated include the following:Nihilism. There are no composite objectse2Quasi-Nihilism. Some few composite objects exist, including persons and perhaps some other living things, but there are no tables, ships, mountains, rivers, planets, pebbles, leaves, eyes, or almost any other of the variety of composite objects that people ordinarily seem to be talking about.' Mereological Essentialism. An object cannot persist with any of its parts replaced4The doctrine of mereological sums. Any two objects compose an object.The doctrine of temporal parts. If an object persists through an interval of time, there is a temporal part of the object that exists only during that interval and that spatially coincides with the object during that interval. Four-dimensionalism. This is the conjunction of the doctrines of mereological sums and temporal parts. It implies that, if we start with the objects ordinarily talked about, any sum of temporal parts of these objects, however discontinuous or gerrymandering, constitutes an object on a par with them.' Nihilism is discussed (and rejected) in Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), ch. 8. Nihilism may be suggested in Peter Unger, "There Are No Ordinary Things", Syntlrese 41 (1980), 117-54. The dispute over nihilism that I view as verbal occurs when both sides agree that there are simples and disagree about whether there are composites. As Theodore Sider pointed out to me, my arguments in this paper do not seem to imply that the question whether there are simples is verbal-a question which, it may be noted, is not about the existence of highly visible objects. Cf. Sider's "Van Inwagen and the Possibility of Gunk",Analysis, 53 (1993), 285-89. See also note 29, below. Two quasi-nihilists are van Inwagen, Material Beings, and Trenton Merricks, Objects and ...

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Variance and Realism is perhaps the most thorough example of a recent trend in metaphysics that steers away from a traditional substantive view while veering towards neo-Carnapian deflationism. Though this monograph contains interesting and valuable discussions on many topics within metametaphysics and metaontology, two main arguments are prominent. First, Hirsch details the thesis of 'quantifier variance' (QV), a position that argues that many (though not necessarily all) of our metaphysical disputes are, in fact, 'merely verbal'; and, secondly, proposes a return to ordinary language metaphysics, favouring those entities in our metaphysical account of the world that normal speakers of a language would generally assent to, under a suitable presumption of charity. Quantifier Variance is a collection of previously published papers, which, whilst each connects in some way to the larger themes outlined above, cover a large amount of ground. As such, with space restrictions, this review will focus on the above two main themes. These overall thematic strands come together across many of the essays, the main bulk of which show a clear line of thought in Hirsch's metaontology since 1997 (all bar one essay originates after 1997), and thus the most instructive method of handling this piece is through a more holistic treatment of the overall arguments, as each is extended and supported within many different articles present in this collection. First, however, these metaontological themes need to be distinguished from related but distinct questions about whether there are any psychological constraints to the ontologies developed by humans. Hirsch covers these issues in 'A Sense of Unity' and 'Basic Objects: A Reply to Xu.' We can leave such questions aside for the moment insofar as clearly, Hirsch's main aim is to provide answers to the question of the metaphysically possible ontological languages, not the psychologically possible ontological languages.

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