A statue and a lump

Suppose that on Monday you bring home a lump of clay and place it on your workbench. Then on Tuesday morning you carefully fashion the clay into a beautiful statue of a snowy owl, which remains in your workshop for all your friends to admire when they come over that night. But suppose that on Wednesday you wake up in a bad mood and decide that you don't like the snowy owl after all. So that morning you squash it back into an amorphous lump of clay.

This example raises several interesting metaphysical questions. Chief among them is this: how many objects are there on your workbench on Tuesday night? One plausible answer is that there is just one object there, namely, the statue. After all, most people, if asked to count the objects on the workbench at that time (most people without a metaphysical agenda, that is), would examine the situation and confidently say that there is just the statue there on the workbench.

Although “one” might seem like the common-sense answer to our question about how many objects are on the workbench on Tuesday night, there are also some good reasons to think that the right answer is “two.” For it is natural to think that there is the lump of clay, which is one thing, and also the statue, which is something distinct from the lump. One reason for thinking this is that the statue and the lump have different histories.