1. Some philosophers think many metaphysical debates meaningless. Consider the debate about ordinary objects such as chairs. These typically are the result of composing more fundamental entities (such as those of the Standard Model). Mereological nihilists say: there are no ordinary objects (such as chairs). Others disagree. /Relativists/ about metaphysics say that these disputes are merely verbal. There is no fact of the matter to discover and expound. Whether or not there is such a thing as a chair is simply a matter of convention.

2. I disagree. But I think one point is right. Relativists point out that it is often (or maybe even always) possible to translate statements between the languages promoted by different metaphysical schools. For example, nihilists translate ‘the chair is on the ground’ to ‘some particles arranged chairwise are such that the particles at the bottom touch the ground’ (or something similar). For this reason, they claim not much hinges on whether nihilists are actually right.

3. Despite my antirelativist metaphysical inclinations, I think it is possible to translate statements in the language given by the ‘same ontology that constitutes reality’ systematically into languages that reflect different metaphysical views.

4. Some of those erroneous metaphysical views may correspond to how we naturally tend to think about certain areas, or the needs of computation (e.g. in being better complexity-wise). For this reason I am sceptical about the (admittedly very interesting) technique advanced in this essay, since it seems to assume that no conflict between these demands will arise.

5. A final worry is that metaphysics does not really speak with one voice. Many philosophers are quite sympathetic to the sort of picture outlined at the start of the essay, but e.g. mereological nihilism is surprisingly popular! If resolving these questions definitively is too much even for philosophers, those applying their conclusions will have some trouble too.