The first thing to say is that this is a great book.1 I loved reading it, working through the examples, and thinking about the puzzles, and I strongly recommend it to people here. It’s obviously relevant to lots of people working in, or teaching, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there also turn out to be things relevant to philosophy of mind, to aesthetics, and, this is what I’ll be talking about, philosophy of social science.
1 The book, of course, is Liebesman and Magidor (2025).
2 These notes are too long, and there are notes along the way about what I’m planning to cut from the presented version. But it was useful to me to have them written out.
I’m not much of a critic since I’m sympathetic to the overall view. One background theme to these remarks is that Leiebesman and Magidor (hereafter, LM) aren’t sufficiently radical. There will be two foreground themes. One is that they need to get more physical; they give physical objects short shrift at a couple of points. Another is that once we have abstracta like i-books, plenitude results a la Fairchild (2019) are inevitable. And then things get weird. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; the social world is weirder than it looks. But cataloging the weirdness is valuable.2
Example 1: Box on Knox
One guiding puzzle is explaining (1).
- There’s a famous book on the shelf.
Puzzle: If ‘book’ means p-book (1) is false, since that p-book isn’t famous. But if ‘book’ means i-book (1) is also false, since the i-book isn’t on the shelf. LM argue against that second claim. They say i-books can be on shelves. But they are more sympathetic to the first. They resist the idea that p-books can always inherit properties that are grounded3 in facts about i-books. The evidence for this is that (2) is defective.
3 I’m being a little cheeky here since I’m not sure they’d agree with expressing things in terms of grounding. But it seems to fit the picture they have, and it’s easy enough to translate this into less metaphysically loaded talk.
- Three wrinkled books on the shelf are bestselling.
That just seems like an awkward locution to me, and not evidence especially about p-books. (3) is just as defective, even though it’s clearly about i-books.
- Three books featuring Inspector Rebus are bestselling.
We can give an independent argument that p-books can inherit properties freely. Imagine my wife and I are moving house. There are plenty of books that we both have in virtue of being cultured people, so our joint collection has some duplicates. The books go in boxes, and each box has 50 p-books and 40 i-books. Now how should we arrange the boxes? There are boring options, like sorting them by genre, chronologically, alphabetically by author, alphabetically by title, etc. But it’s more fun to sort them by sales figures, or by famous, or comedic value. Depending on what sort order we choose, one of (4) to (6) will be true of the first box.
- This box has 50 bestselling books.
- This box has 50 famous books.
- This box has 50 funny books.
In those sentences, ‘book’ must be p-book, because there are only 40 i-books per box. But really any feature of i-book could be used in the penultimate word. So p-books inherit i-book features generally.
Example 2: Lost in Translations
Another core example of the book involves duplicate books. My teenager’s Homer shelf has two copies of the Odyssey and one of the Iliad. Intuitively both (7) and (8) have true readings.
- Their shelf has exactly two books on it.
- Their shelf has exactly three books on it.
My Homer shelf is a more complicated case. It only has the Odyssey, but it has two copies of the Fagles translation and one of the Wilson. It seems to me that all of (9) to (11) have true readings, and I think from what LM say in §9.3 they agree.
- My shelf has exactly one book on it, the Odyssey.
- My shelf has exactly two books on it, the Fagles translation and the Wilson translation
- My shelf has exactly three books on it, which I can throw at those beer bottles.
The solution is to say that the Odyssey is an i-book, and so are the translations of it. That seems like a good step to me, but there are two questions.
One concerns my wife’s Homer shelf, which has one p-book on it, the Wilson translation of the Odyssey. Now (12) is true, but (13) is false, even though there are two i-books, the Odyssey and the Wilson translation of the Odyssey on her shelf.
- Her shelf has exactly one book on it.
- Her shelf has exactly two books on it.
Here’s a challenge. It’s not immediately an objection, but if it can’t be answered it would be. Given LM’s theory of i-books, why don’t we get a true reading of (13)? This is related to an argument Sider (1996) gives against Lewis’s theory of continuants.
The other question concerns how many variants we can get that are like (9) to (11). (In talk I’ll end section here, but the following examples are possibly interesting.)
Does it apply to editions? My Jeffrey shelf has two copies of the first edition of Logic of Decision and one copy of the second edition. Can we get a reading of (14) on which it’s true?
- My Jeffrey shelf has exactly two books on it.
Here’s a slightly harder case. My Keynes shelf at the office has four p-books on it. It has both volumes of Treatise on Money and two copies of the General Theory. It’s easy to get readings where we get two and four books, but can we get a reading where (15) is true?
- My Keynes shelf at the office has exactly three books on it.
I think we can. It has volumes 5 to 7 of the Collected Works, i.e., three books. Compare my Beatles shelf. It has seven pieces of vinyl on it; Revolver and three copies of the White Album. Do we get true readings of each of (16) through (19)?
- My Beatles shelf has two records on it.
- My Beatles shelf has three records on it.
- My Beatles shelf has four records on it.
- My Beatles shelf has seven records on it.
I think so4, but I’m getting less certain. I’ll end this with two cases where I think we really don’t get the readings, though again I’m not certain.
4 For (16) Revolver and the White Album; for (17), Revolver and both discs of the White Album; for (18), the four spines; for (19), the seven discs.
My home Keynes shelf is cleaner. It has the 30 volume collected works, and nothing else. I think (20) is false, the collected works is not a book.
- My Keynes shelf at home has exactly one book on it.
I feel in theory we should be able to get (21), counting the two volumes of the Treatise on Money as one book, or even (22), doing that and also not counting the index, volume 30, as a book. But personally I can’t hear them as true.
- My Keynes shelf at home has exactly 29 books on it.
- My Keynes shelf at home has exactly 28 books on it.
Or from a different direction, my bible shelf has a modern King James bible, and nothing else. (So it doesn’t have the apocrypha.) So here are some books on that shelf: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc. Still, I can’t hear (23) as true.
- My bible shelf has 66 books on it.
But maybe I’m just not sufficiently holy. None of these are objections; unlike the Sider-style point about overlapping books. I just think it’s worth trying to get clearer on what the data is, and what the theory would have to be to track it.
Example 3: Schools of schools
LM say that ‘school’ is not semantically variable. I think that can’t be right, because of what they say about the variable granularity of i-books.
The context is that they argue against people who say that sometimes ‘school’ means ‘school building’. I agree that can’t be right. For one thing, schools typically, at least in my schooling, have multiple buildings. For another, the hypothesis that schools are buildings doesn’t capture the data it was meant to capture, that schools can be vandalized. If one sets fire to the school football field, as I definitely did not do on April 17th 1986, one has vandalized the school but not any building.
But the problem is that schools can come in different granularities, or have different persistence conditions, and that makes ‘school’ semantically variable. Just in Ann Arbor there are a bunch of cases of this. Was the school I work out founded in 1817, when something like it’s closest continuant was founded in Detroit, on in 1837, when a university was first founded in Ann Arbor? Did my current President, President Grasso, change schools when he ‘moved’ from UM Dearborn to UM Ann Arbor to become President? I think in both cases both answers are ok, which is evidence of semantic variability. But there are stronger cases at the elementary level.
Back in the bad old days of segregation, there were two elementary schools in southeast Ann Arbor: Bryant and Pattengill. One of these was predominantly Black, the other predominantly white. (I never learned which was which.) As a desegregation move, the school district was reorganised. Bryant became a K-2 school, and Pattengill a 3-5 school; unlike the typical K-5 organisations. The catchment area was the same for ‘each’. This was a kind of bussing, and it basically worked; a Worthwhile Ann Arbor initiative. There is a level of common organisation to Bryant and Pattengill, but also some independence. The messiness is nicely reflected in their websites, where they have their own name, but also the logo for Bryant-Pattengill.
So question, are these the same school? I think it’s vague in a way that reveals semantic indeterminacy. Imagine two parents whose children just moved from grade 2 at Bryant to grade 3 at Pattengill are asked if their child has changed school. One says (24); the other says (25).
- Yes, they moved from Bryant to Pattengill.
- No, though they moved campus from Bryant to Pattengill.
I’m not from that part of Ann Arbor so I’m not sure of this. But I think in local dialects both answers are acceptable, though they can’t be conjoined. That’s good evidence of semantic variability.
In the talk I’ll finish there, but I’ll note here that there is a case I’m more familiar with that makes a similar point. Ann Arbor has had for several decades something it calls an Open school. This doesn’t have a catchment area, and it has an idiosyncratic curriculum. It’s basically a hippie school. From 1986 to 1999 the Open school was at a campus called Bach. Since then the Open school has been at a campus called Mack. These are only about half a mile apart, closer than Bryant and Pattengill, but they are administratively separate. When Open wasn’t at those campuses, they were normal K-5 schools.
Now we have three characters, Betty, Mary and Gauri. Betty and Mary were elementary school students in the 1990s. Betty went to Bach, i.e., to Open. Mary went to Mack Elementary. They each, separately, talk to Gauri, who is a current student at the Open School at Mack. I’m pretty confident that it’s fine in local dialect for each of them to say (26) to Gauri.
- I went to the same school you’re going to.
But it’s not fine (again in local dialect) for them to say (27) to each other.
- We went to the same school.
I think the only way to square those responses is to say that ‘school’ is semantically variable.
That said, there is one other way to make everything fit together in this example. We might insist that ‘school’ is univocal, and deny the transitivity of identity. LM say in places that they have a particularist approach to metaphysics, staying away from big generalisations. Is transitivity of identity one of those big generalisations that they will be happy to give up to get the simplest explanation of the data? I hope not, but it is a possible way out here.
Example Four: Breakfast at Sweethearts
On the face of it, restaurants look like they should have a similar metaphysics to books. LM deny this, but I’m going to argue it’s actually correct. Actually I’ll do this for coffee shops, where I’m a little more confident, but I think the arguments carries over. If they think I’m right about coffee shops, but the metaphysics of coffee shops is different to that of restaurants, well that would be a cool outcome.
Both coffee shops and books both have the kinda-abstract/kinda-physical features that generated the i-books/p-books distinction. If in a particular terminal there are three Starbucks locations, and no other places to get coffee, then both of (28) and (29) seem like they have true readings.
- There is one coffee shop in the terminal, Starbucks.
- There are three coffee shops in the terminal, the Starbuckses by C8, C14, and C20.
That looks like we should have an i-shop that makes (28) true, namely Starbucks, and three p-shops that make (29) true. But LM deny this. They say the witnesses for (29) are finer grained i-shops, and p-shops aren’t really shops. This seems like a reasonable suggestion, it is what I think the cases in the previous section suggest is correct about schools. But I don’t think it’s correct about coffee shops.
LM argue against the view that ‘restaurant’, or ‘coffee shop’, sometimes picks out a building. And I agree that’s a bad view. P-shops, or P-restaurants, are not buildings. They have one argument for this, here are four more.
- The storefront by gate C8 is not a building; it is a room in a building.
- The cart by gate C20 is even less of a building.
- When there’s outdoor dining the restaurant extends into the street, but no building extends into the street.
- Outdoor restaurants seem inadvisable rather than incoherent.
But p-shops might be locations even if they aren’t buildings. Sometimes they will be campuses, as when a restaurant has multiple not quite connected buildings. But we’ll stick with location.
To argue this, I’ll work through a simplified, idealised, version of O’Hare airport. One where the planes run on time, the bags are transferred, and the food is edible, albeit barely. We’ll start with a real fact about O’Hare: there are 14 Starbucks locations there. And ‘location’ is the word that is usually used. From here on, we’ll depart somewhat from reality. I’ll make the following five other assumptions, all of which I think are false, though the world where they are true is closer than the one where O’Hare has figured out bag transfer.
- There are three Dunkin Donuts locations at O’Hare.
- There are no other coffee shops at O’Hare.
- The Starbucks locations are all administratively unified. They order goods collectively, they have no individual managers, they share staff, and indeed move staff around when one is busy and another is quiet.
- Four of the locations have an express lane out front just for simple orders, and a regular counter inside the store.
- Starbucks O’Hare has a unified management. They obviously keep track of revenue from different parts of the airport. But for revenue tracking purposes, the express counters are treated as independent entities, just like the carts, or the other locations.
Now here are our two natural claims about O’Hare, as described.
- There are two coffee shops at O’Hare: Starbucks and Dunkin.
- There are seventee coffee shops at O’Hare: 14 Starbuckses and 3 Dunkins.
For most travellers, (31) is the more natural, though they could make sense of (30). LM say that both of these sentences are about i-shops at different levels of granularity.
But I just don’t think in this story the individual Starbucks locations are institutions in any meaningful sense. They are just physical locations and nothing more. They don’t have staff, or management, or invoices. Management does keep track of the revenue from most of them, but by revenue centers we’d say there are 18 Starbuckses, counting the express lanes as extra. So we still don’t get 14.
Even more evidence that they are not institutions: they aren’t movable. Without anyone identified as the staff of the location at C14, it can’t move to B9. Starbucks O’Hare could close C14 and open a new one at B9, but that would be a close-and-open, not a relocation. Now in reality I’m sure there are enough staff associated with a particular location that you could make sense of relocating a Starbucks within O’Hare. And so there’s a sense in which the actual 14 Starbucks locations are i-shops.
But I don’t think that institutional independence is necessary for (31) to be true. And I don’t think someone who says (31) to their caffeine-deprived travel companions needs to know about, or be making a claim about, the internal organisation of the Starbuckses at O’Hare. So, I conclude, (31) is a claim about p-shops.
Conclusion
This is a really fun book, and as I’ve been stressing, thinking through what it says can affect how we think about things that are central to some of our lives: schools and coffee shops. I’m sure it also has implications for other, less important things, like municipalities or I guess minds. So I thoroughly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to the discussion.