Everyday Metaphysics
17 Aug 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent via email
In keeping with the theme of public philosophy from last week’s post, this week I’ll be attempting to convey the utility of philosophical thinking in everyday, non-academic life. The obvious way to do this would be to talk about ethics or political philosophy, about how just about everyone is in some way concerned with what a good life is or what a good government is. I’m going to take a somewhat bolder strategy. Today, as you can see from the title, I’ll be talking about metaphysics. Metaphysics is my main field of study. It is also, I think, the easiest area of philosophy to dismiss as esoteric or impractical from outside (and even inside) the study of academic philosophy.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1495–1505, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch
Metaphysics is a broad sub-field of philosophy, and includes debates on the nature of properties, time, space, causation, ontology, mind, and personhood. I think there are practical applications for just about all metaphysical topics, but today we’ll just focus on ontology. Ontology is the study of existence. Some questions in ontology include: do mathematical objects exist, or are they mere useful fictions? Is there real vagueness in the world? When, if ever, does a group of objects form a composite object?
Unfortunately I have neither the time nor space to adequately communicate the rich debates in these areas that philosophers are currently having. In fact, I tried to write a brief overview of just one of the questions above and ended up with a 1200 word digression from my main point. What I actually want to focus on today is the fact that existence questions, like those posed by ontologists, are an everyday phenomenon.
One prominent area where existence questions take center stage is in politics. There are the culture war existence questions about gender, where people debate whether such categories of people as ‘non-binary’ or ‘trans woman’ exist. There are debates about whether such categories are rigid or fluid, and there are debates (mostly confined to the left) about whether gender is a meaningful concept at all.
Geopolitics also has its fair share of existence questions to wrestle with. If you live in the People’s Republic of China, you might think the island off the coast of Fujian province is another part of the PRC, Chinese Taipei. If you live in Taiwan, then you might think that your island is not a part of the PRC, instead being its own country, the Republic of China. This comes down to an existence question: does the Republic of China exist, or not? The same sort of debate occurs (or has occurred) about Ukraine, Palestine, and the United States of America.
Existence questions need not carry the gravitas of geopolitics. Suppose you’ve just build a new bookshelf, and are deciding how to order your books. You might sort the books into color categories. In effect, you’re making an ontological decision about what sorts of books exist on your bookshelf: orange books, green books, blue books, etc. You might instead sort the books by genre, in which case your bookshelf might contain mystery books, science books, or art books.
You might be thinking “Adam, you idiot, the books don’t lose their color when I sort my bookshelf by genre. There are still orange books, they’re just not what the shelf is oriented around.” To which I would say: thank you! I now have a nice segue into talking about the notion of joint-carving.
Philosophers, metaphysicians particularly, often talk about the notion of “carving reality at the joints.” What this means is looking for the natural ways that the world is divided up into distinct categories of existence. One convenient way to carve reality at the joints is to appeal to the fundamental physical stuff that makes up our world. If we carve reality into the categories given to us by the standard model, then things like electrons, photons, and other fundamental particles exist, and everything else is essentially just different shaped piles of this fundamental stuff.
Of course, it would be extremely inconvenient if every time we wanted to refer to something we could only point at different objects and say “that pile of electrons and quarks”. We might still want to allow for talk of non-joint carving properties or objects in some meaningful way.
Let’s return to the bookshelf. Suppose we’ve got the bookshelf sorted by genre, and someone comes in and starts talking about the orange books on the shelf. We might politely, but firmly, tell our guest that talk of ‘orange books’ on this shelf isn’t meaningful, since orange isn’t a joint-carving genre category on the shelf. Alternatively, we could shrug off our guest’s talk of orange books as speaking loosely, what they really want to talk about are the particular books on tigers. Since these books are strewn across a few genres, the talk of orange books is merely a convenient way to refer to the tiger books without listing them individually.
Etretat Porte d’Aval, Claude Monet
A couple more examples of everyday metaphysics before wrapping up. Suppose you are starting a restaurant. You’ve already got a strong idea of what dishes you’ll have available, and it’s time to start making the menus. You now have to make ontological decisions about how to divide up your offerings: you could carve your dishes into categories like appetizers, entrees, and desserts. You might also divide them into vegan and non-vegan options, or pasta, pork, and poultry. However, you decide, you’ll be answering the (existential) question “what sorts of meals does this restaurant serve?”
Suppose you run a multinational conglomerate. How might you divide up your business segments to assign to your VPs? One way to do it might be by sector: energy, consumer package goods, entertainment, etc. Another way might be by geographical distribution, perhaps by continent or by country. Whatever you decide, there are real world consequences. Decide one way, and you have a VP of Asia, decide another and you have a VP of Oil & Gas. Ostensibly, these divisions will have consequences for how effectively (or ineffectively) the business is managed.
What I hope to have demonstrated here is that even areas of philosophy that are often construed as esoteric or impractical have real applications in everyday life. There are substantive existential and ontological questions that we all encounter in every day life, and thinking philosophically about them can help make highly consequential decisions somewhat clearer. Many companies, especially in tech, even hire ontology engineers to help them come up with a schema of what things exist in their corporate ecosystem. A brief search on LinkedIn turns up a job posting for an ontology engineer at a salary of $110-150k.
For those looking for further reading, I’ll point you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This article is a nice overview of debates in material constitution. The entry centers on the question: what is the relationship between a clay statue and the lump of clay it is made of? Are the lump and the statue identical, or are they two different objects? This article talks about a number of different debates in social ontology, which is roughly the metaphysical examination of socially constructed entities like money or social groups. Finally, this article examines the ontological status of abstract objects (like numbers, or sets). If you have any questions, or encounter any difficulty, I’m happy to help.
Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!