Natural Properties, Supervenience, and Mereology

The interpretation of Lewis©s doctrine of natural properties is difficult and controversial, especially when it comes to the bearers of natural properties. According to the prevailing reading ¤ the minimalist view ¤ perfectly natural properties pertain to the microOphysical realm and are instantiated by entities without proper parts or pointOlike. This paper argues that there are reasons internal to a broadly Lewisian kind of metaphysics to think that the minimalist view is fundamentally flawed and that a liberal view, according to which natural properties are instantiated at several or even at all levels of reality, should be preferred. 2XU DUJXPHQWSURFHHGVE UHYLHZLQJWKRVH FRUHSULQFLSOHVRI /HZLV©V metaphysics that are most likely to constrain the size of the bearers of natural properties: the principle of Humean supervenience, the principle of recombination in modal realism, the hypothesis of gunk, and the thesis of composition as identity.