Vague Composition Without Vague Existence

David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection between composition and existence that Lewis assumes. On the resulting view, in troublesome cases of vague composition, there is an object, which definitely exists, about which it is vague whether the relevant borderline parts compose it. I think that there are objects—my chair, for example—that are composed of several material objects. But I deny that there is anything composed of my nose and the Eiffel tower. So I’m a moderate about composition, since I think that there is a restriction on composition, but not a total restriction. Furthermore, I think that the restriction is more or less what you would intuitively take it to be: noses are in; towers are in; tower-noses are out. David Lewis (1986) claims that this view is committed to the possibility of an incoherent sort of vague existence, and he concludes that composition is in fact unrestricted.1 As he puts it: 1 Also see Ted Sider (2001, 120 – 32) for an elaboration and defense of the argument. Sider extends the argument to support four-dimensionalism as well as unrestricted composition. The argument has received a great deal of attention in the literature. For example, see van Inwagen (1990, section 19), Markosian (1998a; 2004), Hawley (2002), Koslicki (2003), Merricks (2005), Hawthorne (2006), Nolan (2006), and Smith (2006).