Mountains and Their Boundaries

Abstract

Amie omasson has made groundbreaking contributions to the ontology of human kinds, both abstract and concrete: literary works and ctional characters (1999), social objects (2003a, 2009b, 2019a), material artifacts (2003b, 2007), and artworks (2010b). My interest here will be on her discussion (2001) of a type of object that arguably straddles the line between human kind and natural kind, namely geographic objects like mountains. In §1, I lay out a puzzle about mountains that generates some pressure towards accepting that we are somehow responsible for their having the boundaries that they do. As a foil for omasson's own account, I present two competing theories of geographic objects-one on which they are thoroughly mind-dependent ( §2), and one on which they are thoroughly mind-independent ( §3)-neither of which yields a fully satisfying solution to the puzzle. I then turn to omasson's intriguing suggestion that, although the geographic objects themselves are mindindependent, the boundaries of those objects are not ( §4). Finally, I