Overdetermination and the Epistemic Argument

Abstract

The overdetermination argument that Merricks advances for the elimination of ordinary objects aims to show that an event, such as the shattering of a window, can never be determined by two independent causes, such as a baseball on the one hand and a collection of atoms arranged baseballwise on the other. And if this is so, then baseballs do not exist. In a previous article, I suggested a novel way to resist that argument. However, Merricks also advances an epistemic argument, which aims to show that we should suspend our belief in the existence of baseballs. I resorted to Korman’s reconstruction of the epistemic argument, in order to deny one of its premises. But my interpretation of the logical structure of the argument was incorrect, since I treated its mere conditionals as if they were biconditionals. Here I would like to correct my mistake, by providing a new refutation of the epistemic argument.