Précis of Objects and Persons

There are no statues or chairs or rocks or planets. But there are microscopic objects. Let’s call them—whatever they may turn out to be—‘atoms’. And although there are no statues, there are atoms “arranged statuewise.” There are also atoms arranged chairwise, atoms arranged rockwise, and atoms arranged planetwise. I “eliminate” many familiar composite macroscopic objects. But I say there are atoms arranged as if they composed the eliminated objects. The burden of Chapter One is to show that this “eliminativism” is neither contradictory nor obviously false. It is not obviously false. At the very least, it can’t be refuted by our “seeing and feeling statues.” For atoms arranged statuewise do all that statues supposedly do, including accounting for all of our visual or tactile “statue” experiences (pp. 2-3), a point to which I return in Chapter Three. Atoms arranged statuewise can do the work of statues. Some might object that this is because ‘there are statues’ just means that there are atoms arranged statuewise. If so, eliminativism is contradictory. But—so I argue—this objection is clearly mistaken given what I mean by ‘atoms arranged statuewise’. That atoms are arranged statuewise means approximately that, if there were statues, then those atoms would compose one