Notes on Holes

1 Terminology and Taxonomy (see Casati and Varzi 1994)

A hole is in a host and filled by a guest. There are at least three kinds of holes:

Cavities

Holes that have no entrance from outside

Hollows

Holes that have one entrance from outside

Tunnels

Holes that have two or more entrances from outside

Examples: the cream-filled hole inside a Twinkie; the hole in a bead; the hole inside a tennis ball; the holes in a Wiffle Ball

2 Some Apparent Features of Holes

• Located in space and time
• Can move (when their host moves)
• Are always in something else (a host) and cannot exist in isolation
• Can be filled without being destroyed

3 An Argument for Dualism

1. There are holes.
2. Holes are immaterial objects.
3. So, there are immaterial objects.

Why think (1)? Because a hole is not identical to its material host(s) or to its material guest(s).

4 Arguments for the Existence of Holes

4.1 The Swiss Cheese Argument

1. There is swiss cheese.
2. Swiss cheese has holes.
3. There are holes.

4.2 The Argument from Perception

1. People see holes.
2. You can’t see something that doesn’t exist.
3. So, holes exist.

4.3 The Argument from Causation

Yea! My bucket’s got a hole in it, Yea! My bucket’s got a hole in it, Yea! My bucket’s got a hole in it, I can’t buy no beer.

5 Some Views About Holes

Realism

There are holes.

Anti-Realism

There are no holes.

Naive Realism

Holes are sui generis¹ spatiotemporally-located immaterial movable fillable objects.

Holes as Ordinary Material Objects

A hole is identical to its guest(s) or its host(s).

Holes as Hole-Linings

A hole is identical to the innermost surface of its host(s).

Holy Objects

There are no holes, only “hole-y” objects: to describe something as “having a hole” is to describe its shape, not a relation it stands in to a thing.

6 Further Reading

Casati, Roberto, and Achille Varzi. 2009. “Holes.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2009, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/holes/.

Casati, Roberto, and Achille C Varzi. 1994. Holes and Other Superficialities. MIT Press.

Sorensen, Roy A. 2008. Seeing dark things: the philosophy of shadows. Oxford University Press.

Wake, Andrew, Joshua Spencer, and Gregory Fowler. 2007. “Holes as Regions of Spacetime.” The Monist 90 (3): 372–78.

Footnotes

1. Fancy Latin for “of its own kind”.