# baker chapter 2 **Opening (not a real abstract):** The reality of ordinary things Are ordinary things irreducibly real? Are the medium-sized objects that we interact with daily (automobiles, people, trees) really the diverse entities that we take them to be; or are they really something else – perhaps homogeneous things like four-dimensional ‘‘spacetime worms’’ or collections of three-dimensional ‘‘simples’’? I shall argue that ordinary things are irreducibly real, three-dimensional objects (I’ll argue for three-dimensionalism in chapter 10) and that they really are of vastly different kinds. The variety of things is not merely conceptual: variety is not just a matter of different concepts being applied to things that are basically of the same sort. Rather, the differences among ordinary things are ontological: a screwdriver is a thing of a fundamentally different kind from a walnut, and both belong in a