Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility

It is a persistent trope in period dramas that the most garishly extravagant character — the matriarch with all the feathers — is most concerned to trumpet their conservative virtues. And so too in metaphysics! Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says — or should say — nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with any reasonable hypothesis about which combinations of properties it is possible for something to have. I argued in the earlier paper that a particular formulation of the target view (Global Plenitude) has exactly that virtue. But like the many-feathered matriarch, Global Plenitude turns out not to be very humble at all. Most vividly, Global Plenitude is incompatible with an exceptionally compelling hypothesis about coincidence: that there are some things which coincide, but might not have. Scandal ensues. Thankfully (as we know from the dramas) untangling a scandal can reveal a lot about the underlying character of the thing. Getting a handle on the shape of the problem for Global Plenitude paves the way for an attractive fix, but also puts significant pressure on our aspriations to ‘humility’. In what follows, I recap and diagnose the problem for the old formulation (Section 2) and propose an improvement (Section 3). Along the way, I discuss a number of connected questions. Section 2.3 explores whether a plenitudinous picture of the world really does require that coincidence be contingent, and Section 5 asks whether plenitude allows for “nontrivial essences.” (Roughly, nontrivial properties that are had essentially if at all.) I argue that both are genuine choice-points, yielding quite different pictures which are nonetheless compatible with what I take to be the characteristic ambitions of plenitude. Both Global Plenitude and the new formulation I propose in Section 3 are what I’ll call ‘essentialist’ varieties of plenitude. Briefly, and with a promise to return to the details: plenitude is