Merricks' Overdetermination Argument for Eliminativism...

I'm working on a paper responding to Trenton Merricks' argument for eliminativism about folk ontology. 

            Trenton Merricks’ Objects and Persons is famously (or, perhaps more accurately, infamously) a book dedicated to its own non-existence:

In this book I shall show that there are no books. Nor are there statues, rocks, tables, stars, or chairs. Indeed I shall argue that there are no inanimate macrophysical objects at all. Thus I shall argue against the existence of most of the objects alleged to exist by what we might call, to be trendy, ‘folk ontology’.

Merricks calls his position ‘eliminativism about folk ontology’.  Merricks conclusion has no doubt resulted in what David Lewis referred to in a difference context as “the incredulous stare.”  To confess, I am somewhat sympathetic with both Merricks’ arguments for eliminativism, as well as his conclusion.  But in this paper, I want to develop what can be thought of as a fold-friendly defense of folk ontology.  More specifically, I argue that one can reject one of Merricks’ main arguments for eliminativism without being committed to any of the ontological costs that Merricks’ thinks the existence of books, statues and the like convey.  In § 1, I present Merricks’ Overdetermination Argument for eliminativism.  In § 2, I briefly canvas some of the extant rebuttals to the overdetermination argument.  Then, in § 3, I develop an account of the items of folk ontology that neither leads to their elimination nor systematic overdetermination.

1. if there are other extant replies to the argument that I'm not currently aware of, and
2. what you think of my Michael Burke inspired suggestion at the end of section two that atoms cease to exist when they come to compose a baseball (note: I don't actually endorse this view, but it seems no crazier than other things philosophers think).