Yoorim In

Repeatable artworks pose a unique ontological challenge due to their seemingly contradictory features—repeatability, creatability, changeability, and modal flexibility. While creationism claims an advantage over discoverism in accounting for changeability and modal flexibility, I argue that these very features present significant metaphysical puzzles that creationism cannot satisfactorily resolve. First, I introduce Dodd’s ‘Revision Puzzle,’ which challenges the coherence of changeability. Second, I develop a parallel ‘Modal Puzzle’ demonstrating that modal flexibility leads to paradoxical consequences regarding trans-world identity. For each puzzle, I examine possible responses that creationists might consider and demonstrate why each proves unsatisfactory. In a nutshell, these puzzles reveal that our intuitions about repeatable artworks may be fundamentally mistaken, suggesting that discoverism’s strategy of explaining away these features, rather than literally accommodating them, may be metaphysically sounder than previously recognized.