Is Alex O’Connor’s argument for mereological nihilism philosophically confused?
In some of Alex O’Connor’s discussions of mereological nihilism, he appears to argue roughly as follows:
The world contains particles, fields, or lower-level physical structure.
Ordinary composite objects such as tables, microphones, or sports teams depend on our classificatory interests.
Since different ways of grouping matter are possible, no one grouping is objectively privileged.
Therefore ordinary composite objects do not really exist, except as mind-dependent divisions or projections.
I am trying to understand whether this is considered a serious argument by anyone in contemporary metaphysics, or whether it commits a fairly basic mistake.
My worry is that the argument seems to move too quickly from: “There are many possible ways to describe or partition the world” to:
“Ordinary objects are not real.”
But that inference looks invalid. Lots of real things seem description-relative, scale-relative, context-sensitive, socially constituted, or non-fundamental without being unreal. Sports teams, organisms, artifacts, institutions, storms, and biological species may all raise hard questions about individuation, but that alone does not obviously imply eliminativism.
So my questions are:
Is this kind of argument actually representative of serious mereological nihilism, or is it a popular-level oversimplification?
Does the appeal to arbitrary divisions of matter establish nihilism, or only establish that ordinary-object boundaries are vague, interest-relative, or non-fundamental?
Are examples like sports teams even good evidence for nihilism about material objects, or do they conflate social/institutional ontology with mereology?
What are the strongest academic arguments for mereological nihilism, and how do they differ from this kind of argument?
Which philosophers give the best replies to the “arbitrary grouping” argument against ordinary objects?