Title: A carving-based account of metaphysical indeterminacy
Abstract: Debates about metaphysical indeterminacy are typically framed in terms of fundamentality: to show that metaphysical indeterminacy is a genuine feature of the world, one must show that it can be fundamental. This framing presupposes a level-based picture of reality—one in which reality is organised into levels, from the most to the least fundamental. According to this picture, carving reality at its joints is a level-specific endeavour and the fundamental is metaphysically privileged (one way or another). In this paper, I suggest an alternative picture: metaphysical indeterminacy amounts to reality admitting of indeterminate carvings, regardless of level. Building on the supervaluational mereology in Cotnoir and Schirripa (2026), I hold that the mereotopological structure of states partially depends on how their constituents (objects and properties) are mereotopologically organised, but that indeterminacy is located only in states. Obtaining is introduced as primitive and carving-relative, albeit constrained by the structure of states. Indeterminate carvings comprise some indeterminately obtaining state that stands in indeterminate mereological relations to some other state; determinate carvings make precise which states obtain and how they are related.
