Is Shepherd a Bundle Theorist?

Abstract

Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditional regarding qualities and objects: Necessarily, an object exists if and only if some bundle of qualities exists. There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side – that is, that Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities or causal powers. I argue here that, despite appearances, this interpretation reverses Shepherd's actual view. I argue that for Shepherd qualities, or causal powers, are grounded in the intrinsic constitutions of objects. In the case of ‘external objects’, these intrinsic constitutions are unknowable to us; in the case of ‘internal objects’, we have direct knowledge of them.