On Doing Without Ontology: Feature-Placing on a Global Scale

Ontological Nihilism. It’s an extreme view—to extreme to be defended by most, even though variants and close cousins have their champions. Turner 2010 argues against the view with a dilemma. Some have resisted one horn of the dilemma. Less attention has been paid to the dilemma’s other horn. But a variant of Ontological Nihilism can avoid that other horn: Global Nihilism, which attempts to describe an object-free world all in one go. Despite appearances, Global Nihilism cannot be eliminated on grounds of simplicity or parsimony. However, one may object to its implicit holism. The argument here is that we learn the world by encountering it one piece at a time, but the Global Nihilist cannot provide the metaphysical ‘pieces’ of the world needed to explain how we do this.