Humeanism Begins in the Middle

Humean supervenience holds that the world consists of a mosaic of local intrinsic qualities distributed across spacetime, with all truths supervening on that distribution. The thesis is distinguished by its claim to completeness: the mosaic is the entire fundamental base, with nothing fundamental left over. This paper argues that the claim cannot be sustained. For properties to be distributed across spacetime, a spatiotemporal ordering must already be in place. Three routes to grounding this ordering within Humean resources are identified and shown to be exhaustive. Each fails: the first is circular, the second generates a vicious regress, and the third inherits the very ordering it was supposed to avoid positing as prior. A Humean who declares the ordering brute surrenders completeness and concedes that the mosaic rests on a structure it did not build. The ordering is shown to be one instance of a general structural condition any domain theory must presuppose.