Category: Facts
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Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws
Malcolm Pollack solicited my comments on an article by Tomas Bogardus that appeared in Religious Studies under the title, If naturalism is true, then scientific explanationis impossible. Malcolm summarizes: I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if…
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Semirealism about Facts: An Exchange with Butchvarov
Facts are the logical objects corresponding to whole declarative sentences, or rather to some of them. When it comes to facts, Panayot Butchvarov appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism. For the realist, there are facts. For the anti-realist, there are no facts. Let us briefly review why both positions are attractive…
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On J. P. Moreland’s Theory of Existence
A re-post from February of 2016 with corrections and addenda. What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58. It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article. First I summarize…
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Penultimate Draft: Meinertsen Review for Metaphysica
REVIEW ARTICLE Bo R. Meinertsen, Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress, Springer 2018, 174 + xviii pp. Summary Professor Meinertsen's detailed treatment of states of affairs agrees with the spirit and much of the letter of David M. Armstrong's middle period as represented in his A World of…
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Meinertsen on the Merely Apparent Existence of Thick Particulars
This is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica. Here is the first installment. A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is…
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Non-Substantial Change, Trope Bundle Theory, and States of Affairs
I am presently writing a review article for Metaphysica about Bo R. Meinertsen's Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress (Springer 2018). Since I will probably incorporate the following critical remarks into my review, I want to give Bo a chance to respond. Substantial and Non-Substantial Change One way…
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Indexicality and Omniscience
Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument for the impossibility of divine omniscience. What I know when I know that 1. I am making a mess is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that 2. BV is making a mess or perhaps, pointing…
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Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined
A correspondent asked me my opinion of the following passage from G. K. Chesterton: Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes.…
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An Exchange on the Metaphysics of Truthmaking
Dan M: Discussing a puzzle about divine simplicity has led us to the metaphysics of truthmaking; I'll just focus on the latter for now – but the broader dialectic is this: I was thinking that a particular view about truthmaking can help us with that puzzle about simplicity. [Cf. first related article below.] Take your…
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Mental Act Nominalism with an Application to Divine Simplicity
This entry continues a discussion with Dan M. begun here. Before we get to the main event, a terminological quibble. A view that denies some category of entity I would call eliminativist, not nominalist. I say this because one can be a nominalist about properties without denying their existence. Tom is a tomato of…
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Against Ostrich Nominalism
As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility any other human pursuit, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. (This is true of other disciplines as well,…
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Correspondence and Truthmaking
I posed the following problem: A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality. B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure. C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure. London Ed solves it by rejecting (A). But let me first say why I accept (A). Consider a true…
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The Truthmakers of Truths About Truths
Josh writes, I would be interested to see how you respond to the following dilemma (from Peter Geach, "Truth and God," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, [1982]: 84). Say proposition P1 is true because it corresponds to fact F. Does the proposition "Proposition P1 is true" (call it proposition P2) have a truthmaker? It seems…
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Does Reality Have a Sentence-Like Structure?
Our problem may be formulated as an antilogism, or aporetic triad: A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality. B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure. C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure. This trio of propositions is inconsistent. And yet one can make a plausible…