Title: Saying Something with Nothing
Abstract: Ontological nihilism is the view that fundamentally there are no objects. Whilst it is an increasingly popular view, nihilists face a so-called expressive adequacy challenge. Standard natural and formal languages carve up the world into at least objects and properties/relations satisfied by those objects. But the nihilist doesn’t think there are any objects! How, then, are they to express themselves? The dominant approach is modelled on natural language feature-placing sentences. Just as I can commit to “It is raining” without thinking that any one particular thing is raining, nihilists develop sophisticated feature-placing languages to talk about how the world is a certain way without committing to there being any particular thing which is that way. I raise some issues for this approach and argue that the expressive adequacy challenge for nihilism is much harder to solve than people have recognised. I then suggest a general diagnosis of what goes wrong for the nihilist. In brief, I argue that there are two different underlying conceptions of nihilism which are mistakenly run together and only one of these leads to problems of expressive adequacy. To end, I sketch one way of developing the less-discussed conception of nihilism in response to the expressive adequacy worry.