The contemporary philosopher, Peter Unger (1942–) is known for introducing another philosophical problem relating to the constitution of material objects. It’s called the ‘Problem of the Many’, and it focuses on objects like clouds, land masses, and seas, which don’t have clearly demarcated borders. Take the example of a cloud. A cloud is a nebulous mass of water droplets, and so there are very many equally good ways we could demarcate the boundary of it. At certain points in the sky, where some particular cloud starts to thin out and the droplets are less densely packed together, we can ask of a certain region of water droplets: are they are in the cloud, at the edge of it, or outside-of and just-near-to it? The trouble is, if several ways of drawing a boundary around (demarcating an edge of) the cloud are equally good, then it seems that we don’t have any determinate answer to give here. Consequently, we have several things here which can equally legitimately count as clouds: the set of water droplets that ends at one point, the set that ends at another just a little further on… and so on. But if that is so, then we have to admit that we have many clouds here, not just one!
Unger’s solution to this is therefore to deny that there are any such things as clouds: if ab object does not have clearly-demarcated boundaries, then it is not an object at all! Others however seek to find less radical solutions to this problem. | |||