 Natural language has been used, for example, by Fine (2003) to elucidate the intuitive distinction between an object and the material constituting it While the statue may seem a distinct entity from the alloy that constitutes it, the distinction becomes particularly convincing when paying attention to ranges of predicates that are or aren’t meaningfully applicable to the statue and the alloy. The statue can be said to be “defective”, “well made”, “valuable”, “ugly”, “Romanesque”, “insured”, or “admired”, even though the alloy which makes it up is not. Some predicates may not hold of the alloy; others cannot even be applied meaningfully to it, e.g., Romanesque. A philosopher that denies an ontological distinction between an object and the matter constituting it faces the considerable challenge of explaining those differences in the applicability of predicates.