(Anti-)Realisms: The Metaphysical Issue - OpenEdition Journals

Philosophia ScientiæTravaux d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences

12-1 | 2008(Anti-)Realisms: The Metaphysical IssueRoger Pouivet et Manuel Rebuschi (dir.)

Édition électroniqueURL : http://journals.openedition.org/philosophiascientiae/195DOI : 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.195ISSN : 1775-4283

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Édition impriméeDate de publication : 1 avril 2008ISSN : 1281-2463

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Preface

Roger Pouivet & Manuel RebuschiL.H.S.P. – Archives H. Poincaré (UMR 7117)

The fundamental question of Metaphysics is “What is reality?” Andthe most fundamental question about this fundamental question is “Canwe answer this question?”

Full realists think we can. They are convinced that the world is in-dependent of our minds and that we can know it as it is independentlyof us. Half realists think that the world is independent of us (onto-logical realism), but that we cannot know it as it is independently ofour minds (epistemological anti-realism). Full anti-realists think thatboth the world and our knowledge of it depend on our minds, thoughts,languages, categories, conceptual schemes, ways of worldmaking, intel-lectual habits, social practices, political organization, gender, sexualpreferences, and so on. For them, “reality” is a deeply relative word;and reality is something we make, not something we find. It is a con-struct, not a ready-made. The realism/anti-realism debate is clearlymeta-metaphysical. It is a way to ask whether metaphysics is merelypossible, and if the anti-realist stance is a kind of metaphysics or a wayto reject metaphysics.

The realism/anti-realism debate takes many forms in metaphysics,where it gets its full generality, in philosophy of science, where it op-poses scientific realists and instrumentalists, in philosophy of perception,where one can distinguish perceptual realism from many forms of repre-sentationalism, in ethics, where the question at stake is to know if there

Philosophia Scientiæ, 12 (1), 2008, 1–5.

2 Roger Pouivet & Manuel Rebuschi

are moral facts, in aesthetics, when one wonders whether aesthetics prop-erties are real and projected, and so on. Some philosophers think thatthis debate takes too many forms to be completely serious and honest.One can be realist in one domain and not in another. Even a realist inaesthetics, for example, is not obliged to accept the thesis that Mrs Bo-vary or any fictional character is real. Many scientific realists would saythat non-natural properties, such as moral properties if they are such,are not real, and hence would also be moral non-realists.

The question of modality has often been at the core of the realism/anti-realism debate. We speak about what is possible or not, what isnecessary or not, what ought to be the case or ought not to be the case,and so on. What do we speak about by using such formulas? Realiaor simply what we think and speak about, something whose existence isonly mental and/or linguistic? The question of truth is also very sen-sitive to the realism/anti-realism debate. Proposed in 1742, Goldbach’sconjecture claims that every even integer greater than two is the sum oftwo primes. When we write this preface, it has not been proven in fullgenerality. Realists in mathematics think that Goldbach’s conjecture iseither determinately true or determinately false. Perhaps we will neverdiscover if it is true or false, but for sure it is one or the other. Anti-realists think that we constructed numbers. Goldbach’s conjecture couldbe neither determinately true not determinately false. Our constructionof numbers does not perhaps contain the solution of such a conjecture.

In the glorious heyday of Logical Positivism, it was possible to de-scribe Analytical philosophy as anti-metaphysical. Since, through thework of Russell, Quine, Strawson, Chisholm, Dummett, Armstrong, D.Lewis, van Inwagen, and others, metaphysics regains slowly but surelyits central position in analytic philosophy. This could be the meaning ofthe current importance of the realism/anti-realism debate. Metaphysicsis back again. It is back not only because some philosophers are realists– a lot are not. It is back because philosophers think that it makes senseto enter this debate, and not simply to claim that realism is a philo-sophical illusion, logocentrism, or the result of some social constraint.They do not think that metaphysics is dead but they like to discuss thequestion if we can understand the notion “the reality as it is in itself”,and eventually know something about it.

The following papers examine realism pro and contra. They havebeen presented, under this form or another, at the (Anti-)Realisms Con-ference held at the University of Nancy 2 at the end of June and begin-ning of July 2006. This conference was organized by our research group“Archives Henri Poincaré”. This is the opportunity to remark that the

Preface 3

realism/anti-realism debate is clearly in the heritage of Poincaré. Indeed,even though Poincaré defended his famous conventionalist doctrine hehas always been worried by the threat of loosing contact with the con-ception of reality as something independent from our mind.

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The volume is divided into four parts. In the first part, The Metaphys-ical issue, three papers are gathered which are all concerned with gen-eral issues of realism: realism against conceptualism, moderate againststrong realism about properties, realism about axiological properties.

In his paper “Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism, and the Errorsof Conceptualism”, E. Jonathan Lowe defends strong realism about es-sences, i.e., the idea that entities have both general and individualessences and that these are knowable. He claims that such a position isa consequence of any consistent realism, and that conceptualism aboutessences is an incoherent doctrine. Moreover, Lowe wants to account forthe cognitive role of concepts within his strong essentialism.

Sandrine Darsel’s paper “A Realistic and Non Reductionnist Strat-egy with respect to Properties” supports the project of a fostering ontol-ogy involving non-physical properties such as aesthetic ones, on a basisindependent of their causal account. The author puts forward a meta-ontological argumentation in order to shift our existential criteria forproperties: according to her, we should retain an explicative criterionand get rid of the more usual causal one.

Darek Łukasiewicz’s contribution, entitled “Metaphysics of Axiolog-ical Realism”, is a presentation of the Czeżowski’s account of valuesand axiological sentences. According to the great member of the Lvov-Warsaw School, values are not properties but should nevertheless beconceived of as real. Values are to be thought of as modi essendi, whichare transcendental concepts. Such a kind of realism about values thusavoids the reduction of axiological sentences to naturalistic sentences.

The second part of the volume is devoted to Modal (Anti)Realism,and more specifically to the philosophical disputes about the ontologicalstatus of possible objects.

Frédéric Nef, in his paper “Which Variety of Realism? Some Assev-erations on the Dependence of Abstracta upon Concreta", sketches adiscussion about metaphysical and ontological nihilisms. The first oneholds that there could be no concrete objects, hence that there could beat most abstract objects, while according the second one there could be

4 Roger Pouivet & Manuel Rebuschi

nothing at all. Lowe argued that in order to avoid nihilism one shouldconsider that abstracta depend on concreta. Nef thinks it is untrue, andclaims that realism is better preserved by a moderate form of Platonismcompatible with modal realism.

Scott Shalkowski’s “Blackburn’s Rejection of Modals” is a criticaldiscussion of Simon Blackburn’s argument against truth-conditional ac-counts of modalities. The author convincingly argues that one couldescape the critics of circularity grounding her ontology on basic primi-tive modal facts.

The third part, Truths, is mainly concerned with what is known assemantic or alethic realism, i.e. the idea that the truth-value of sentencesor thoughts is built up independently from our recognition. Alternativelythe antirealistic view holds that there are no truth-conditions indepen-dent of our grasping.

In his paper “Three Forms of Pluralism about Truth”, Michael P.Lynch shows the advantages and limitations of three pluralistic accountsof truth: simple alethic pluralism, and two kinds of functionalism, a re-ductive one grounded on basic properties (realizers), and a non-reductiveone based on truth-roles. Michael P. Lynch argues that none of theseconceptions is completely satisfactory. In his conclusion, he draws theperspective of a new account based on immanency.

Tommaso Piazza’s paper, “Truth and Warranted Assertibility”, ex-amines Alston’s critique of truth as warranted assertibility, one of themain accounts about truth in an anti-realist stance. The paper providesan up-to-date perspective on the realism/anti-realism debate, especiallyconcerning its alethic aspects.

In “Mind-Dependence, Irrealism and Superassertibility” Daniel Lau-rier gives a systematic exploration of the relationship between fact-realism and Dummett-like accounts of judgements. He proposes to en-large the independence-claims of realism about facts, usually restrictedto knowability, to an independence from other attitudes such as conceiv-ability. The conclusion is, against Wright, that truth being dependentupon knowability does not entail that truth should consist in superassert-ibility.

In the fourth and last part of the volume, Radical Construc-tivism?, two papers present philosophical disputes about strong anti-realism.

In the paper “Was George Orwell a Metaphysical Realist?”, Peter vanInwagen considers the debate between Winson and O’Brien in Orwell’s1984 as a debate between a realist and an anti-realist, hence Orwell’s

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position as a standing up for realism about truth. Van Inwagen re-jects Conant’s criticisms against this interpretation as a case of nonsensein philosophy. Furthermore, the author draws a general defense of analethic realistic doctrine.

Tom Burke’s paper, “(Anti)Realist Implications of Pragmatist Dual-Process Active-Externalist Theory of Experience”, proposes a pragma-tic-cum-realist account of knowledge. The author reaches a positionlabeled as ecological realism, which avoids radical constructivism albeitincluding constructivist components. The paper thus gives new insightson the pragmatic stance about reality.

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To conclude, we wish to thank the authors for their contributions to thiscollection which, we hope, should offer a nice overview of contemporaryresearch about the realism/anti-realism debate in analytic metaphysics.We also thank Prosper Doh for his patient work and help to manage thetechnical editorial process of the whole volume.

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Part I

The Metaphysical issue

Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism, and theErrors of Conceptualism

E. Jonathan LoweUniversity of Durham

Résumé : Le réalisme métaphysique est la conception suivant laquelle laplupart des objets qui peuplent le monde existent indépendamment de notrepensée et possèdent une nature indépendante de la manière dont nous pou-vons éventuellement la concevoir. A mon sens cette position engage à admettreune forme robuste d’essentialisme. Beaucoup des formes modernes de l’anti-réalisme tirent leurs origines d’une forme de conceptualisme, suivant laquelletoutes les vérités que nous puissions connaître au sujet des essences sont endernière analyse fondées sur nos concepts, plutôt que dans les choses « enelles-mêmes ». Mon but est de montrer que l’anti-réalisme conceptualiste estune doctrine incohérente, et comment nous pouvons soutenir le réalisme mé-taphysique et l’essentialisme robuste, tout en reconnaissant clairement le rôlecognitif des concepts en tant qu’intermédiaires dans notre appréhension de lanature de la réalité indépendante de l’esprit.

Abstract: Metaphysical realism is the view that most of the objects thatpopulate the world exist independently of our thought and have their naturesindependently of how, if at all, we conceive of them. It is committed, in myopinion, to a robust form of essentialism. Many modern forms of anti-realismhave their roots in a form of conceptualism, according to which all truths aboutessence knowable by us are ultimately grounded in our concepts, rather than inthings ‘in themselves’. My aim is to show that conceptualist anti-realism is anincoherent doctrine and how we can support metaphysical realism and robustessentialism, while still properly acknowledging the cognitive role of conceptsin mediating our grasp of the nature of mind-independent reality.

1 Metaphysical Realism versus Conceptual-ist Anti-Realism

Metaphysical realism is the view that most of the objects that populatethe world exist independently of our thought and have their natures in-dependently of how, if at all, we conceive of them. Metaphysical realism


10 E. Jonathan Lowe

is committed, in my opinion, to a robust form of essentialism, that is, tothe doctrine that there are mind-independent facts about the identitiesof most objects. ‘Identity’ in this sense means individual essence, whichJohn Locke aptly characterized as ‘the very being of any thing, wherebyit is, what it is’. Many modern forms of anti-realism have their basisin a form of conceptualism, according to which all truths about essenceknowable by us are ultimately grounded in our concepts — that is, in ourways of thinking about things — rather than in things ‘in themselves’.This view has its historical roots in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy,so that contemporary conceptualist anti-realism may, without undue dis-tortion, be described as ‘neo-Kantian’ in spirit. This is despite the factthat one important way in which its adherents differ from the historicalKant is in their emphasis upon language as the medium of thought, asa result of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy that occurred inthe early-to-mid twentieth century.

My aim in the present paper is to show that and why conceptualistanti-realism is an incoherent doctrine and why and how we can and mustsupport metaphysical realism and robust essentialism, while still prop-erly acknowledging the cognitive role of concepts in mediating our graspof the nature of mind-independent reality. I shall begin with a sketch ofthe version of essentialism that I favour — a version that I call seriousessentialism — and in the course of doing so I shall identify its threekey principles. Then I shall try to explain why I think that conceptual-ism can provide no adequate substitute for this form of essentialism andinevitably collapses into an incoherent variety of global anti-realism.

2 Serious Essentialism

It is vital for my purposes in this paper that the doctrine of essentialismbe suitably understood. I say this because many contemporary possible-worlds theorists readily describe themselves as essentialists and proposeand defend what they call essentialist claims, formulated in terms of thelanguage of possible worlds. They will say, for instance, that an essentialproperty of an object is one that the object possesses in every possibleworld in which it exists. And they will typically claim that some, but notall, of an object’s actual properties are essential to it in this sense. Buta doctrine of this sort is not serious essentialism in my sense, becauseit attempts to characterize essence in terms of antecedently assumednotions of possibility and necessity and thus — in my view — putsthe cart before the horse. It is at best ersatz essentialism. So what is

Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism . . . 11

serious essentialism? To pursue this query, one might seek to ask whatessences are. However, this question is already potentially misleading,for it invites the reply that essences are entities of some special sort. And,as we shall see, I want to deny that essences are entities. According toserious essentialism, as I understand it, all entities have essences, buttheir essences are certainly not further entities related to them in somespecial way.

So, what do we or, rather, what should we mean by the ‘essence’ of athing — where by ‘thing’, in this context, I just mean any sort of entitywhatever? We can, I suggest, do no better than to recall John Locke’sperceptive words on the subject, which go right to its heart. Essence,Locke said, in the ‘proper original signification’ of the word, is ‘the verybeing of any thing, whereby it is, what it is’ [Locke 1975, III, III, 15]. Inshort, the essence of something, X, is what Xis, or what it is to be X1.In another locution, X’s essence is the very identity of X — a locutionthat I am happy to adopt, provided that it is clearly understood thatto speak of something’s ‘identity’ in this sense is quite different fromspeaking of the identity relation in which it necessarily stands to itselfand to no other thing. However, in order to avoid potential confusionabout the meaning of locutions such as these, I think that it is importantto draw, from the very start, a distinction between general and individualessence2. The key point to be emphasized in this connection is that anyindividual thing, X, must be a thing of some general kind — because, atthe very least, it must belong to some ontological category. Rememberthat by ‘thing’ here I just mean ‘entity’. So, for example, X might bea material object, or a person, or a property, or a set, or a number, ora proposition, or whatnot — the list goes on, in a manner that dependson what one takes to be a full enumeration of the ontological categoriesto be included in it3. This point being accepted, if X is something ofkind K, then we may say that X’s general essence is what it is to be aK, while X’s individual essence is what it is to be the individual of kind

1The historical source of this view lies, of course, with Aristotle, whose phraseτo τι ην ειναι (‘to ti en einai’) is standardly translated as ‘essence’: see Aristotle,Metaphysics Z, 4. Its more literal meaning is ‘the what it is to be’ or ‘the what itwould be to be’.

2I do not attempt to offer here a semantic analysis of expressions such as ‘whatX is’, ‘what it is to be X’ or ‘the identity of X’, though that is no doubt an exercisethat should be undertaken at some stage in a full account of what I am calling serious

essentialism. I assume that our practical grasp of the meaning of such expressionsis adequate for a preliminary presentation of the approach of the sort that I am nowengaged in.

3For my own account of what ontological categories we should recognize and whichwe should regard as fundamental, see [Lowe 2006], especially Part I.

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K that X is, as opposed to any other individual of that kind.

Before I proceed, however, an important complication must be dealtwith. It should be evident that we cannot simply assume that there isonly ever a single appropriate answer to the question ‘What kind of thingis X?’. For instance, if ‘a cat’ is an appropriate answer to this question,then so will be the answers ‘an animal’ and ‘a living organism’. So too, ofcourse, might be the answer ‘a Siamese cat’. It is important to recognize,however, that some, but not all, of these answers plausibly announce thefact that X belongs to a certain ontological category. In my own view, ‘Xis a living organism’, does announce such a fact, but ‘X is a cat’ does not.I take it that the substantive noun ‘cat’ denotes a certain natural kindand consider that such kinds are a species of universal. Thus, as I see it,natural kinds, such as the kind cat, are themselves things belonging to acertain ontological category — the category of universals — but such akind is not itself an ontological category, because ontological categoriesare not things at all, to be included in a complete inventory of whatthere is (see [Lowe 1998, ch. 8] and [Lowe 2006, ch. 2]). One upshot ofall this is that I want to maintain that a certain sort of ambiguity mayattach to questions concerning a thing’s general essence, as I shall nowtry to explain.

An implication of what I have said so far is that if ‘a cat’ is an ap-propriate answer to the question ‘What kind of thing is X?’, then wemay say that X’s general essence is what it is to be a cat. But, while Idon’t want to retreat from this claim, I do want to qualify it. I shouldlike to say that if X is a cat, then X’s fundamental general essence iswhat it is to be a living organism, because that — in my view — is themost narrow (or ‘lowest’) ontological category to which X may be as-signed. The reason for this is that it is part of the individual essence ofthe natural kind cat — of which X is ex hypothesi a member — that itis a kind of living organisms. Now, there are, I believe, certain essentialtruths concerning X which do not issue from its fundamental generalessence but only from the fact that it belongs to this particular natu-ral kind. These are essential truths concerning X which are determinedsolely by the individual essence of that natural kind4. Accordingly, I

4I want to maintain that X’s fundamental general essence determines what isabsolutely metaphysically necessary for X, whereas the individual essence of thenatural kind cat determines only what is metaphysically necessary for Xqua memberof that kind. Thus, in my view, being a cat is not an absolute metaphysical necessityfor any individual living organism that is, in fact, a cat. To put it another way:I believe that it is metaphysically possible — even if not biologically or physically

possible — for any individual cat to survive ‘radical’ metamorphosis, by becoming amember of another natural kind of living organism. See further [Lowe 1998, 54–6].


want to say that what it is to be a cat, while it is not X’s fundamen-tal general essence, is nonetheless what we might appropriately call X’sspecific general essence, on the grounds that the kind cat is the mostspecific (or ‘lowest’) natural kind to which X may be assigned5. How-ever, I readily acknowledge that the distinction that I am now tryingto draw between ‘fundamental’ and ‘specific’ general essence in the caseof individual members of natural kinds is a controversial one that needsmuch fuller justification than I am able to give it here. Hence, in whatfollows, I shall try as far as possible to prescind from this distinction,hoping that the simplification involved in doing so will cause no damageto the overall thrust of my arguments6.

3 Why are Essences Needed?

I have just urged that all individual things — all entities — have bothgeneral and individual essences, a thing’s general essence being what it isto be a thing of its kind and its individual essence being what it is to bethe individual of that kind that it is, as opposed to any other individual ofthat kind. But why suppose that things must have ‘essences’ in this senseand that we can, at least in some cases, know those essences? First of all,because otherwise it makes no sense — or so I believe — to say that wecan talk or think comprehendingly about things at all. For if we do notat least know what a thing is, how can we talk or think comprehendinglyabout it? 7 How, for instance, can I talk or think comprehendinglyabout Tom, a particular cat, if I simply don’t know what cats are andwhich cat, in particular, Tom is? Of course, I’m not saying that I mustknow everything about cats or about Tom in order to be able to talk

5I take it here, at least for the sake of argument, that there are ‘higher’ naturalkinds to which X may be assigned, such as the kinds mammal and vertebrate, butthat Siamese cats — for example — do not constitute a distinct natural kind of theirown.

6One consequence of this simplification is that I shall often continue to speak of‘the’ kind to which a thing belongs, without discriminating between ‘kind’ in thesense of ontological category and ‘kind’ in the sense of natural kind, and withoutexplicit acknowledgement of the fact that the question ‘What kind of thing is X?’may be capable of receiving more than one appropriate answer.

7Note that I ask only how we can talk or think comprehendingly about a thingif we do not know what it is — not how we can perceive a thing if we do not knowwhat it is. I am happy to allow that a subject S may, for example, see an object O

even though S does not know what O is. Seeing, however, is not a purely intellectiveact. Indeed, of course, even lower animals that cannot at all plausibly be said tounderstand what objects exist in their environment, may nonetheless be said to see

or feel or smell some of those objects.

14 E. Jonathan Lowe

or think comprehendingly about that particular animal8. But I mustsurely know enough to distinguish the kind of thing that Tom is fromother kinds of thing, and enough to distinguish Tom in particular fromother individual things of Tom’s kind. Otherwise, it seems that my talkand thought cannot really fasten upon Tom, as opposed to somethingelse9. However, denying the reality of essences doesn’t only create anepistemological problem: it also creates an ontological problem. UnlessTom has an ‘identity’ — whether or not anyone is acquainted with it —there is nothing to make Tom the particular thing that he is, as opposedto any other thing. Anti-essentialism commits us to anti-realism, andindeed to an anti-realism so global that it is surely incoherent. It willnot do, for instance, to try to restrict one’s anti-essentialism to ‘theexternal world’, somehow privileging us and our language and thought.How could it be that there is a fact of the matter as to our identities,and the identities of our words and thoughts, but not as to the identitiesof the mind-independent entities that we try to capture in language andthought? On the other hand, how could there not be any fact of thematter as to our identities and the identities of our words and thoughts?Everything is, in Joseph Butler’s memorable phrase, what it is and notanother thing. That has sounded to many philosophers like a mere truismwithout significant content, as though it were just an affirmation of the

8Perhaps, indeed, all I need to know about cats is that they are animals or living

organisms and perhaps, likewise, all I need to know about Tom is which animal orliving organism he is.

9Of course, it is fashionable at present to suppose that our talk and thought have,in general, their referents in the ‘external’ world secured through the existence ofappropriate causal links between certain constituents of our talk and thought —certain of our linguistic and mental ‘representations’ — and various extra-linguisticand extra-mental entities belonging to that world: links that can, and mostly do,obtain without our needing to have any knowledge of them. On this sort of view,it may be supposed, my talk and thought can fasten upon Tom because there is anappropriate causal link between the name ‘Tom’, as I have learnt to use it, and Tom

— and an analogous causal link between a certain ‘mental representation’ of mine(perhaps a certain ‘symbol’ in the putative ‘language of thought’ supposedly utilizedby my brain) and Tom. I will only say here that I cannot begin to understand howit might seriously be supposed that a linkage of this sort could genuinely suffice toenable me to talk and think comprehendingly about Tom, even if it is conceded thatthere is a (relatively anodyne) notion of ‘reference’ that could perhaps be satisfactorilyaccounted for by a causal theory of the foregoing sort. I should emphasize, then, thatI am not presently concerned to challenge the so-called causal theory of reference,much less to defend in opposition to it some sort of neo-Fregean theory of referenceas being mediated by ‘sense’. Rather, I am simply not interested, at present, insemantic questions or rival semantic theories, but rather in the purely metaphysicalquestion of how it is possible to be acquainted with an object of thought : my answerbeing that it is so through, and only through, a grasp of that object’s essence — thatis, through knowing what it is.


reflexivity of the identity relation. But, in fact, Butler’s dictum doesnot merely concern the identity relation but also identity in the senseof essence. It implies that there is a fact of the matter as to what anyparticular thing is — that is, as to its ‘very being’, in Locke’s phrase.Its very being — its identity — is what makes it the thing that it is andthereby distinct from any other thing.

Essences are apt to seem very elusive and mysterious, especially iftalked about in a highly generalized fashion, as I have been doing sofar. Really, I suggest, they are quite familiar to us. Above all, we needto appreciate that in very many cases a thing’s essence involves otherthings, to which it stands in relations of essential dependence. Considerthe following thing, for instance: the set of planets whose orbits liewithin that of Jupiter. What kind of thing is that? Well, of course, itis a set, and as such an abstract entity that depends essentially for itsexistence and identity on the things that are its members — namely,Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Part of what it is to be a set is to besomething that depends in these ways upon certain other things — thethings that are its members. Someone who did not grasp that fact wouldnot understand what a set is. Furthermore, someone who did not knowwhich things are this set’s members, or at least what determined whichthings are its members, would not know which particular set this set is.So, someone who knew that its members are the planets just mentionedwould know which set it is, as would someone who knew what it is to be aplanet whose orbit lies within that of Jupiter10. This is a simple example,but it serves to illustrate a general point. In many cases, we know whata thing is — both what kind of thing it is and which particular thingof that kind it is — only by knowing that it is related in certain waysto other things. In such cases, the thing in question depends essentiallyon these other things for its existence or its identity. To say that X

depends essentially on Y for its existence and identity is just to say thatit is part of the essence of X that X exists only if Y exists and part ofthe essence of X that X stands in some unique relation to Y (see [Lowe1998, ch. 6], or [Lowe 2005a]). Knowing a thing’s essence, in many cases,is accordingly simply a matter of understanding the relations of essentialdependence in which it stands to other things whose essences we in turn

10There are, broadly speaking, two different views of what a set is: one which takesa set simply to be the result of — as David Lewis [1991, vii] puts it — ‘collectingmany into one’, and another which takes a set to be the extension of a property orof a concept. I see no compelling reason why, in principle, our ontology should notaccommodate sets in both of these understandings of what they are. But since I amusing the example of sets only for illustrative purposes, this is a matter on which Ican afford to remain agnostic here.

16 E. Jonathan Lowe

know.

4 Essences are not Entities

I said earlier that it is wrong to think of essences as themselves being en-tities of any kind to which the things having them stand in some specialkind of relation. Locke himself unfortunately made this mistake, hold-ing as he did that the ‘real essence’ of a material substance just is its‘particular internal constitution’ — or, as we would now describe it, itsatomic or molecular structure11. This is a mistake that has been perpet-uated in the modern doctrine, made popular by the work of Saul Kripkeand Hilary Putnam, that the essence of water consists in its molecularmake-up, H2O, and that the essence of a living organism consists in itsDNA — the suggestion being that we discover these ‘essences’ simply bycareful scientific investigation of the things in question (see, especially,[Kripke 1980] and [Putnam 1975]). Now, as we saw earlier, it may wellbe part of the essence of a thing that it stands in a certain relation tosome other thing, or kind of things. But the essence itself — the verybeing of a thing, whereby it is, what it is — is not and could not besome further entity. So, for instance, it might perhaps be acceptable tosay that it is part of the essence of water that it is composed of H2Omolecules (an issue that I shall return to shortly). But the essence ofwater could not simply be H2O — molecules of that very kind — nor yetthe property of being composed of H2O molecules. For one thing, if theessence of an entity were just some further entity, then it in turn wouldhave to have an essence of its own and we would be faced with an infi-nite regress that, at worst, would be vicious and, at best, would appearto make all knowledge of essence impossible for finite minds like ours.To know something’s essence is not to be acquainted with some furtherthing of a special kind, but simply to understand what exactly that thingis. This, indeed, is why knowledge of essence is possible, for it is a prod-uct simply of understanding — not of empirical observation, much lessof some mysterious kind of quasi-perceptual acquaintance with esotericentities of any sort. And, on pain of incoherence, we cannot deny thatwe understand what at least some things are, and thereby know theiressences.

11Thus, at one point Locke remarks: ‘[W]e come to have the Ideas of particular

sorts of Substances, by collecting such Combinations of simple Ideas, as are by Ex-perience ... taken notice of to exist together, and are therefore supposed to flow fromthe particular internal Constitution, or unknown Essence of that Substance’ [Locke1975, II, XXIII, 3].


Here it may be objected that it is inconsistent of me to deny thatessences are entities and yet go on, as I apparently do, to refer to andeven quantify over essences. Someone who voices this objection proba-bly has in mind W. V. Quine’s notorious criterion of ontological com-mitment, encapsulated in his slogan ‘to be is to be the value of a vari-able’ [see, for example, Quine 1969]. I reply, in the first place, that Icould probably say all that I want to about my version of essentialismwhile avoiding all locutions involving the appearance of reference to andquantification over essences, by paraphrasing them in terms of locutionsinvolving only sentential operators of the form ‘it is part of the essence ofX that’ — where ‘the essence of X’ is not taken to make an independentcontribution to the meaning of the operator, which might be representedsymbolically by, say, ‘EX ’ in a sentential formula of the form ‘EX(p)’.The latter is a kind of locution that I certainly do want to use and findvery useful. However, I think that effort spent on working out suchparaphrases in all cases would be effort wasted. If a paraphrase meansthe same as what it is supposed to paraphrase — as it had better do,if it is to be any good — then it carries the same ‘ontological commit-ments’ as whatever it is supposed to paraphrase, so that constructingparaphrases cannot be a way of relieving ourselves of ontological com-mitments. We cannot discover those commitments simply by examiningthe syntax and semantics of our language, for syntax and semantics arevery uncertain guides to ontology. In other words, I see no reason toplace any confidence in Quine’s famous criterion.

5 Essence Precedes Existence

Another crucial point about essence is this: in general, essence precedesexistence. And by this I mean that the former precedes the latter bothontologically and epistemically. That is to say, on the one hand, I meanthat it is a precondition of something’s existing that its essence — alongwith the essences of other existing things — does not preclude its exis-tence. And, on the other hand — and this is what I want to concentrateon now — I mean that we can in general know the essence of somethingX antecedently to knowing whether or not X exists. Otherwise, it seemsto me, we could never find out that something exists. For how could wefind out that something, X, exists before knowing what X is — beforeknowing, that is, what it is whose existence we have supposedly discov-

18 E. Jonathan Lowe

ered?12 Consequently, we know the essences of many things which, asit turns out, do not exist. For we know what these things would be, ifthey existed, and we retain this knowledge when we discover that, infact, they do not exist. Conceivably, there are exceptions. Perhaps itreally is true in the case of God, for instance, that essence does not pre-cede existence. But this could not quite generally be the case. However,saying this is perfectly consistent with acknowledging that, sometimes,we may only come to know the essence of something after we have dis-covered the existence of certain other kinds of things. This is what goeson in many fields of theoretical science. Scientists trying to discoverthe transuranic elements knew before they found them what it was thatthey were trying to find, but only because they knew that what theywere trying to find were elements whose atomic nuclei were composedof protons and neutrons in certain hitherto undiscovered combinations.They could hardly have known what they were trying to find, however,prior to the discovery of the existence of protons and neutrons — foronly after these sub-atomic particles were discovered and investigateddid the structure of atomic nuclei become sufficiently well-understoodfor scientists to be able to anticipate which combinations of nucleonswould give rise to reasonably stable nuclei.

Here it may be objected that Kripke and Putnam have taught usthat the essences of many familiar natural kinds — such as the kind catand the kind water — have been revealed to us only a posteriori andconsequently that in cases such as these, at least, it cannot be true tosay that ‘essence precedes existence’, whatever may be said in the caseof the transuranic elements13. The presupposition here, of course, is

12Notoriously, Descartes is supposed to have claimed, in the Second Meditation, toknow that he existed before he knew what he was — that is, before he grasped his ownessence. But it seems to me that any such claim must be construed as being eitherdisingenuous or else intended non-literally, if it is not to be dismissed as being simplyincomprehensible. It might, for instance, be taken to imply merely that Descarteswas certain that the word ‘I’ had a reference, before knowing what that referencewas. To be accurate, though, what Descartes actually says is ‘But I do not yet have asufficient understanding of what this “I” is, that now necessarily exists’: see Descartes1986, 17. That is consistent with saying that Descartes does already grasp his ownessence, but needs to clear his mind of confused thoughts concerning it. Query: mightwe not come to know what X is neither before nor after discovering that X exists,but simultaneously with that discovery? Well, I see no reason to deny this possibilityin some cases. But that concession need not be taken to undermine the claim that,in general, we can know the essence of something X before knowing whether or notX exists.

13The extent to which the Kripke-Putnam doctrine has become a commonplaceof contemporary analytic philosophy is illustrated by the following remark of FrankJackson’s, which he makes simply in passing and without acknowledging any need to


that Kripke and Putnam are correct in identifying the essence of water,for example, with its molecular make-up, H2O. Now, I have already ex-plained why I think that such identifications are mistaken, to the extentthat they can be supposed to involve the illicit reification of essences.But it may still be urged against me that even if, more cautiously, wesay only that it is part of the essence of water that it is composed of H2Omolecules, it still follows that the essence of water has only been revealedto us — or, at least, has only been fully revealed to us — a posteriori.

In point of fact, however, the Kripke-Putnam doctrine is even moreobscure and questionable than I have so far represented it as being.Very often, it is characterized in terms of the supposed modal and epis-temic status of identity-statements involving natural kind terms, such as‘Water is H2O’, which are said to express truths that are at once nec-essary and a posteriori. In such a statement, however, the term ‘H2O’is plainly not functioning in exactly the same way as it does in the ex-pression ‘H2O molecule’. The latter expression, it seems clear, means‘molecule composed of two hydrogen ions and one oxygen ion’. But in‘Water is H2O’, understood as an identity-statement concerning kinds,we must either take ‘H2O’ to be elliptical for the definite description‘the stuff composed of H2O molecules’ or else simply as being a propername of a kind of stuff, in which case we cannot read into it any signif-icant semantic structure. On the latter interpretation, ‘Water is H2O’

justify it: ‘[W]e rarely know the essence of the things our words denote (indeed, ifKripke is right about the necessity of origin, we do not know our own essences)’: seeJackson 1998, 50. Yet, I would urge, it should strike one as being odd to the point ofparadoxicality to maintain that we can talk or think comprehendingly about thingswithout knowing what it is that we are talking or thinking about — that is, withoutgrasping their essences. The charitable conclusion to draw would be that philosopherslike Jackson do not use the term ‘essence’ in what Locke called its ‘proper originalsignification’. Now, of course, Locke himself says that the ‘real’ essences of materialsubstances are unknown to us — and the Kripke-Putnam doctrine is recognizablya descendent of Locke’s view, to the extent that it identifies the ‘real essences’ ofmaterial substances with their ‘internal constitutions’, many of which are certainlystill unknown to us and may forever continue to be so. But Locke, at least, concluded— unlike modern adherents of the Kripke-Putnam doctrine — that ‘the supposition

of Essences, that cannot be known; and the making them nevertheless to be that,which distinguishes the Species of Things, is so wholly useless. . . [as] to make us layit by’ [Locke 1975, III, III, 17] and he accordingly appeals instead to what he callsnominal essences. The correct position, I suggest, is neither Locke’s nor that ofthe Kripke-Putnam doctrine, but rather (what I take to be) Aristotle’s: that the realessences of material substances are known to those who talk or think comprehendinglyabout such substances — and consequently that such essences are not to be identifiedwith anything that is not generally known to such speakers and thinkers, such as the‘particular internal constitution’ of a material substance, or a human being’s (or otherliving creature’s) ‘origin’ in the Kripkean sense.

20 E. Jonathan Lowe

is exactly analogous to ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ and its necessary truthreveals nothing of substance to us concerning the composition of water.If we are inclined to think otherwise, this is because we slide illicitlyfrom construing ‘ H2O’ as a proper name to construing it as ellipticalfor the definite description ‘the stuff composed of H2O molecules’. Now,when ‘Water is H2O’ is understood on the model of ‘Hesperus is Phos-phorus’, its necessary a posteriori truth may in principle be establishedin a like manner — namely, by appeal to the familiar logical proof of thenecessity of identity14, together with the a posteriori discovery of theco-reference of the proper names involved — but not so when it is con-strued as meaning ‘Water is the stuff composed of H2O molecules’, forthe latter involves a definite description and the logical proof in questionnotoriously fails to apply where identity-statements involving definitedescriptions are concerned. Thus far, then, we have been given no rea-son to suppose that ‘Water is H2O’ expresses an a posteriori necessarytruth that reveals to us something concerning the essence of water. Theappearance that we have been given such a reason is the result of meresleight of hand15.

There is, in any case, another important consideration that we shouldbear in mind when reflecting on the frequently-invoked analogy between‘Water is H2O’ and ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’. It is all very well to pointout that the discovery that Hesperus is Phosphorus was an empiricalone. But it was not purely empirical, for the following reason. Theidentity was established because astronomers discovered that Hesperusand Phosphorus coincide in their orbits: wherever Hesperus is locatedat any given time, there too is Phosphorus located. However, spatiotem-poral coincidence only implies identity for things of appropriate kinds.It is only because Hesperus and Phosphorus are taken to be planets andthereby material objects of the same kind that their spatiotemporal co-incidence can be taken to imply their identity. But the principle thatdistinct material objects of the same kind cannot coincide spatiotempo-rally is not an empirical one: it is an a priori one implied by what it is tobe a material object of any kind — in other words, it is a truth grounded

14See [Kripke 1971]. I express doubts about the cogency of this proof in [Lowe2005b]. However, for present purposes I set aside these doubts.

15Here I note that it might be thought that ‘Water is the stuff composed of H2Omolecules’ follows unproblematically from the supposed empirical truth ‘Water isH2O’ (construed as an identity-statement involving two proper names) and the seem-ingly trivial, because analytic, truth ‘H2O is the stuff composed of H2O molecules’.But the latter, when the first occurrence of ‘H2O’ in it is interpreted as a propername, is no more trivial than ‘Water is the stuff composed of H2O molecules’ — andthis is how it must be interpreted for the inference to go through.


in essence. It is only because we know that it is part of the essence ofa planet not to coincide spatiotemporally with another planet, that wecan infer the identity of Hesperus with Phosphorus from the fact thatthey coincide in their orbits. Thus, one must already know what a planetis — know its essence — in order to be able to establish by a posteriorimeans that one planet is identical with another16. By the same token,then, one must already know what a kind of stuff is — know its essence— in order to be able to establish by a posteriori means that one kindof stuff is identical with another. It can hardly be the case, then, thatwe can discover the essence of a kind of stuff simply by establishing aposteriori the truth of an identity-statement concerning kinds of stuff— any more than we can be supposed to have discovered the essence ofa particular planet by establishing a posteriori the truth of an identity-statement concerning that planet. So, even granting that ‘Water is H2O’is a true identity-statement that is both necessarily true and known aposteriori, it does not at all follow that it can be taken to reveal to usthe essence of the kind of stuff that we call ‘water’.

Be all this as it may, however, we still have to address the questionof whether, in fact, we ought to say that it is part of the essence of waterthat it is composed of H2O molecules. So far, we have at best seen only

16Here it may be asked: did astronomers know which planet Hesperus is — that is,know its individual essence — before knowing that it is identical with Phosphorus?It might seem that the answer must be ‘No’: for if they did, it may be wondered,how could they have been in any doubt as to its identity with Phosphorus? However,here we need to bear in mind that it is clearly not part of the essence of any planetthat it has the particular orbit that it does: a planet can certainly change its orbit,and indeed could have had a quite different one. But what led to the discovery thatHesperus is the same planet as Phosphorus was simply that their orbits were plottedand found to coincide. And since one can know which planet a planet is withoutknowing what its orbit is, it is therefore perfectly explicable that astronomers should— and did — know which planet Hesperus is and which planet Phosphorus is withoutknowing that Hesperus is the same planet as Phosphorus. So how, in general, does

one know which material object of kind K a certain material object, O, is? Well, oneway in which one can know this, it seems clear, is through perceptual acquaintance

with O that is informed by knowledge of the general essence of objects of kind K.(Recall, here, that perception of an object O does not in itself presuppose knowledgeof what O is, so that the foregoing claim does not beg the very question at issue.)That is to say, it very often happens that one perceives an object O in circumstancesthat enable one to know thatwhat one is perceiving, O, is a particular object of kindK. In such circumstances, one is thus in a position to know which object of thiskind O is — namely, that one (the one that one is perceiving). And one can retainthis knowledge by remembering which object it was that one perceived. I shouldemphasize, however, that this does not at all imply that it is part of O’s individualessence that it is the object of kind K that one perceived on a particular occasion —for, of course, it will in general be an entirely contingent matter that one happenedto perceive it then, or indeed at all.

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that the Kripke-Putnam semantics for natural kind terms have givenus no reason to suppose that we ought to. I am inclined to answer asfollows. If we are using the term ‘water’ to talk about a certain chemi-cal compound whose nature is understood by theoretical chemists, thenindeed we should say that it is part of the essence of this compoundthat it consists of H2O molecules. But, at the same time, it should beacknowledged that the existence of this compound is a relatively recentdiscovery, which could not have been made before the nature of hydrogenand oxygen atoms and their ability to form molecules were understood.Consequently, when we use the term ‘water’ in everyday conversationand when our forebears used it before the advent of modern chemistry,we are and they were not using it to talk about a chemical compoundwhose nature is now understood by theoretical chemists. We are andthey were using it to talk about a certain kind of liquid, distinguishablefrom other kinds of liquid by certain fairly easily detectable macroscopicfeatures, such as its transparency, colourlessness, and tastelessness. Weare right, I assume, in thinking that a liquid of this kind actually ex-ists, but not that it is part of its essence that it is composed of H2Omolecules. At the same time, however, we should certainly acknowledgethat empirical scientific inquiry reveals that, indeed, the chemical com-pound H2O is very largely what bodies of this liquid are made up of.In fact, the natural laws governing this and other chemical compoundsmake it overwhelmingly unlikely that this kind of liquid could have adifferent chemical composition in different parts of our universe. Butthe ‘could’ here is expressive of mere physical or natural possibility, notmetaphysical possibility17. Only an illicit conflation of these two speciesof possibility could reinstate the claim that water is essentially composedof H2O molecules.

But, it may be asked, what about our supposed ‘intuitions’ in so-called ‘Twin-Earth’ cases — for example, the supposed intuition that if,on a distant planet, a watery stuff was discovered that was not com-posed of H2O molecules, then it would not be water? In answer to thisquestion, I would remark only that these supposed intuitions need to beinterpreted in the light of the fact, just mentioned, that the natural lawsgoverning chemical compounds in our universe almost certainly rendersuch scenarios physically impossible. The supposedly ‘watery’ stuff onTwin Earth would be like fool’s gold (copper pyrites): it would at bestbe casually mistakable for water and that is why it would not be water.The chemical explanation for this would be that it is not composed of

17For extended discussion of the need to distinguish between these two species ofpossibility, see [Lowe 2006, ch. 9 & ch. 10].


H2O molecules. But we cannot turn this perfectly legitimate chemicalexplanation into a logico-cum-metaphysical argument that genuine wa-ter is of metaphysical necessity composed of H2O molecules — unless,once again, we conflate physical with metaphysical necessity.

6 Essence is the Ground of All Modal Truth

So far, I have urged that the following two principles must be endorsedby the serious essentialist: that essences are not entities and that, ingeneral, essence precedes existence. But by far the most important prin-ciple to recognize concerning essences, for the purposes of the presentpaper, is that essences are the ground of all metaphysical necessity andpossibility (compare [Fine 1994]). One reason, thus, why it can be thecase that X is necessarily F is that it is part of the essence of X thatX is F . For example, any material object is necessarily spatially ex-tended because it is part of the essence of a material object that it isspatially extended — in other words, part of what it is to be a materialobject is to be something that is spatially extended. But this is not theonly possible reason why something may be necessarily F . X may benecessarily F on account of the essence of something else to which X

is suitably related. For example, Socrates is necessarily the subject ofthe following event — the death of Socrates — because it is part of theessence of that event that Socrates is its subject, even though it is notpart of Socrates’s essence that he is the subject of that event. It is noton account of what Socrates is that he is necessarily the subject of thatevent but, rather, on account of what that event is18. This is not to saythat Socrates could not have died a different death, only that no one butSocrates could have died the death that he in fact died. And what goesfor necessity goes likewise, mutatis mutandis, for possibility. I ventureto affirm that all facts about what is necessary or possible, in the meta-physical sense, are grounded in facts concerning the essences of things —not only of existing things, but also of non-existing things. But, I repeat,facts concerning the essences of things are not facts concerning entitiesof a special kind, they are just facts concerning what things are — theirvery beings or identities. And these are facts that we can therefore graspsimply in virtue of understanding what things are, which we must in atleast some cases be able to do, on pain of being incapable of thought

18Note that analogously, then, it could be conceded that H2O molecules necessarilycompose water without it being conceded that it is part of the essence of water to becomposed of H2O molecules — for the necessity may be explained instead as arisingfrom the essence of H2O molecules.

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altogether. Consequently, all knowledge of metaphysical necessity andpossibility is ultimately a product of the understanding, not of any sortof quasi-perceptual acquaintance, much less of ordinary empirical obser-vation.

How, for example, do we know that two distinct things of suitablydifferent kinds, such as a bronze statue and the lump of bronze com-posing it at any given time, can — unlike two planets — exist in thesame place at the same time? Certainly not by looking very hard atwhat there is in that place at that time. Just by looking, we shall notsee that two distinct things occupy that place. We know this, rather,because we know what a bronze statue is and what a lump of bronzeis. We thereby know that these are different things and that a thingof the first sort must, at any given time, be composed by a thing ofthe second sort, since it is part of the essence of a bronze statue to becomposed of bronze. We know that they are different things because, inknowing what they are, we know their identity conditions, and therebyknow that one of them can persist through changes through which theother cannot persist — that, for instance, a lump of bronze can persistthrough a radical change in its shape whereas a bronze statue cannot.These facts about their identity conditions are not matters that we candiscover purely empirically, by examining bronze statues and lumps ofbronze very closely, as we might in order to discover whether, say, theyconduct electricity or dissolve in sulphuric acid (see further [Lowe 2003]and [Lowe 2002], the latter being a reply to [Olson 2001] ). Rather, theyare facts about them that we must grasp antecedently to being able toembark upon any such empirical inquiry concerning them, for we canonly inquire empirically into something’s properties if we already knowwhat it is that we are examining..

7 Essentialism and Conceptualism

At this point I need to counter a rival view of essence that is attractive tomany philosophers but is, I think, ultimately incoherent. I call this viewconceptualism19. It is the view that what I have been calling facts about

19Who, it might be asked, is really a conceptualist in the sense that I am about toarticulate? That is difficult to say with any assurance, since most conceptualists areunderstandably rather coy about proclaiming their position too explicitly. However,amongst major analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, Michael Dummett veryplausibly counts as one, in virtue of his apparent endorsement of the view that realityis an ‘amorphous lump’ that can be ‘sliced up’ in indefinitely many different butequally legitimate ways, depending on what conceptual scheme we or other thinkers


essences are really, in the end, just facts about certain of our concepts —for example, our concept of a bronze statue and our concept of a lumpof bronze. This would reduce all modal truths to conceptual truthsor, if the old-fashioned term is preferred, analytic truths. Now, I haveno objection to the notion of conceptual truth as such. Perhaps, as isoften alleged, ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ indeed expresses such a truth.Let us concede that it is true in virtue of our concept of a bachelor,or in virtue of what we take the word ‘bachelor’ to mean. But noticethat ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ very plausibly has a quite different modalstatus from an essential truth such as, for example, ‘Cats are composedof matter’. In calling the former a ‘necessary’ truth, we cannot mean toimply that bachelors cannot marry, only that they cannot marry and goon rightly being called ‘bachelors’. The impossibility in question is onlyone concerning the proper application of a word. But in calling ‘Catsare composed of matter’ a necessary truth, we certainly can’t be takento mean merely that cats cannot cease to be composed of matter andgo on rightly being called ‘cats’ — as though the very same thing that,when composed of matter, was properly called a ‘cat’ might continueto exist as something immaterial. No: we must be taken to mean thatcats cannot fail to be composed of matter simpliciter, that is, withoutqualification. Cats are things such that, if they exist at all, they must becomposed of matter. The impossibility of there being an immaterial catis not one that merely concerns the proper application of a word: it is,rather, a genuinely de re impossibility. That, I contend, is because it isone grounded in the essence of cats, inasmuch as it is part of the essenceof a cat, as a living organism, to be composed of matter. In contrast, itis not part of the essence of any bachelor to be unmarried, for a bacheloris just an adult male human being who happens to be unmarried —and any such human being undoubtedly can marry. So, it seems clear,‘Cats are composed of matter’ is certainly not a mere conceptual truth,and the same goes for other truths that are genuinely essential truths— truths concerning or grounded in the essences of things. They have,in general, nothing to do with our concepts or our words, but ratherwith the natures of the things in question. Of course, since conceptsand words are themselves things of certain sorts, there can be truthsconcerning their essences. Indeed, what we could say about ‘Bachelors

happen to deploy: see [Dummett 1981, 563, 577]. So might David Wiggins, who callshis position ‘conceptualist realism’ and acknowledges, as the only admissible notionof individuation, a cognitive one which takes this to be a singling out of objects

by thinkers: see [Wiggins 2001, 6]. And so, indeed, might Hilary Putnam, on theevidence of such papers as Putnam 1983, whose flavour seems distinctly differentfrom that of earlier work of his cited previously.

26 E. Jonathan Lowe

are unmarried’ is that it is, or is grounded in, a truth concerning theessence of the concept bachelor, or of the word ‘bachelor’. We couldsay, thus, that it is part of the essence of the concept bachelor thatonly unmarried males fall under it, and part of the essence of the word‘bachelor’ that it applies only to unmarried males.

At this point, I anticipate the following possible response from theconceptualist, challenging my attempt to distinguish between the modalstatus of the statements ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ and ‘Cats are com-posed of matter’. Both statements, the conceptualist may say, expressconceptual truths, and the difference between them lies only in the factthat, while the term ‘cat’ is a so-called substance sortal, the term ‘bache-lor’ is only a phase sortal (for this distinction, see [Wiggins 2001, 28-30]).This, he may say, adequately explains why it makes no sense to supposethat something, by ceasing to be composed of matter, could cease toqualify as a cat and yet go on existing — for a substance sortal is pre-cisely a term that, by definition, applies to something, if it applies to itall, throughout that thing’s existence. To this I respond as follows. Weneed to ask, crucially, what determines whether or not a given generalterm should be deemed to be a substance sortal. If this is taken simplyto be a matter of what concept it expresses for speakers of the languagein question, rather than a matter of what manner of thing it applies to,then deeply anti-realist consequences immediately ensue. To see this,suppose that there is a community of speakers who speak a languagevery like English in most ways, except that in place of the term ‘bache-lor’ they deploy the term ‘sbachelor’, where ‘sbachelor’ in their languageis (supposedly) a substance sortal rather than a phase sortal, so thatthey would deem ‘Sbachelors are unmarried’ to be on a par, modally,with ‘Cats are composed of matter’ — the implication being that, forthese speakers, a sbachelor ceases to exist if he undergoes a marriageceremony and is replaced by a numerically different being, called (let ussay) a ‘shusband’. So, where ordinary English speakers would describea certain situation as being one in which a certain man survives thetransition from being a bachelor to being a husband, speakers of ourimaginary community would instead describe the very same situation asbeing one in which a certain sbachelor ceases to exist and is replacedby a shusband. As far as I can see, the conceptualist cannot say thatwe ordinary English speakers describe this situation rightly and that theimagined speakers describe it wrongly : for the only standard of correct-ness to which the conceptualist can appeal is that provided by the actualconceptual repertoire of the speakers of any given language. That beingso, since the two speech communities clearly differ over the question as


to whether or not, in the envisaged situation, something has ceased toexist, the conceptualist seems committed to the conclusion that thereis no mind-independent fact of the matter concerning such existentialquestions — and this position is blatantly anti-realist20.

But I said that conceptualism is ultimately incoherent. Indeed, Ithink it is. For one thing, as we have just seen, the proper thing tosay about ‘conceptual’ truths is, very plausibly, that they are groundedin the essences of concepts. That being so, the conceptualist cannotmaintain, as he does, that all putative facts about essence are reallyjust facts concerning concepts. For this is to imply that putative factsabout the essences of concepts are really just facts concerning concepts ofconcepts — and we have set out on a vicious infinite regress. No doubtthe conceptualist will object that this complaint is question-begging.However, even setting it aside, we can surely see that conceptualismis untenable. For the conceptualist is at least committed to affirmingthat concepts — or, in another version, words — exist and indeed thatconcept-users do, to wit, ourselves. These, at least, are things thatthe conceptualist must acknowledge to have identities, independently ofhow we conceive of them, on pain of incoherence in his position. Theconceptualist must at least purport to understand what a concept or aword is, and indeed what he or she is, and thus grasp the essences ofat least some things. And if of these things, why not of other kinds ofthings? Once knowledge of essences is conceded, the game is up for theconceptualist. And it must be conceded, even by the conceptualist, onpain of denying that he or she knows what anything is, including thevery concepts that lie at the heart of his account. For, recall, all that Imean by the essence of something is what it is.

I recognize, however, that conceptualism is deeply entrenched in somephilosophical quarters and that conceptualists are consequently unlikelyto relinquish their views very readily in the light of objections of thesort that I have just raised. Hence, in the remaining two sections ofthis paper, I shall endeavour to undermine conceptualism in two furtherways: first, by exposing the unholy alliance between conceptualism andscepticism and, second, by developing a more general argument to showhow conceptualism leads to global anti-realism and why it is ultimatelyincoherent.

20In any case, it is relatively easy to think of other examples of necessary truthswhich, even less controversially, cannot sensibly be taken to be merely conceptualtruths — for example, ‘Socrates is not divisible by 3’.

28 E. Jonathan Lowe

8 Conceptualism and Scepticism

Why is anyone ever even tempted by conceptualism, if it has such deepflaws as I maintain? My own view is that this temptation is the legacyof scepticism, particularly scepticism concerning ‘the external world’.The sceptic feels at home with himself and with his words and concepts,but expresses doubt that we can ever really know whether those wordsand concepts properly or adequately characterize things in the externalworld. He thinks that we can know nothing about how or what thosethings are ‘in themselves’, or indeed even whether they are many or one.According to the sceptic, all that we can really know is how we conceiveof the world, or describe it in language, not how it is. But by what spe-cial dispensation does the sceptic exclude our concepts and our wordsfrom the scope of his doubt? For are they not, too, things that exist?There is, in truth, no intelligible division that can be drawn betweenthe external world, on the one hand, and us and our concepts and ourlanguage on the other. Here it may be protested: But how, then, canwe advance to a knowledge of what and how things are ‘in themselves’,even granted that the sceptic is mistaken in claiming a special dispensa-tion with regard to the epistemic status of our concepts and our words?However, the fundamental mistake is to suppose, with the sceptic, thatsuch an ‘advance’ would have to proceed from a basis in our knowl-edge of our concepts and words — that is, from a knowledge of how weconceive of and describe the world — to a knowledge of that world ‘asit is in itself’, independently of our conceptual schemes and languages.This ‘inside-out’ account of how knowledge of mind-independent realityis to be acquired already makes such knowledge impossible and musttherefore be rejected as incoherent.

But what alternative is there, barring a retreat to some form of anti-realism? Again, knowledge of essence comes to the rescue. Because,in general, essence precedes existence, we can at least sometimes knowwhat it is to be a K — for example, what it is to be a material ob-ject of a certain kind — and thereby know, at least in part, what is oris not possible with regard to Ks, in advance of knowing whether, oreven having good reason to believe that, any such thing as a K actuallyexists. Knowing already, however, what it is whose existence is in ques-tion and that its existence is at least possible, we can intelligibly andjustifiably appeal to empirical evidence to confirm or cast doubt uponexistence claims concerning such things. By ‘empirical evidence’ here,be it noted, I emphatically do not mean evidence constituted purely bythe contents of our own perceptual states at any given time, as though


all that we had to go on is how the world in our vicinity looks or other-wise appears to be. That, certainly, is not the conception of ‘empiricalevidence’ that is operative in scientific practice, which appeals ratherto the results of controlled experiments and observations, all of whichare reported in terms of properties and relations of mind-independentobjects, such as scientific instruments and laboratory specimens. Thegrowth of objective knowledge consists, then, in a constant interplay be-tween an a priori element — knowledge of essence — and an a posteriorielement, the empirical testing of existential hypotheses whose possibil-ity has already been anticipated a priori. This process does not have afoundational ‘starting point’ and it is constantly subject to critical reap-praisal, both with regard to its a priori ingredients and with regard toits empirical contributions. Here we do not have a hopeless ‘inside-out’account of objective knowledge, since our own subjective states as ob-jective inquirers — our perceptions and our conceptions — are accordedno special role in the genesis of such knowledge. Those subjective statesare merely some amongst the many possible objects of knowledge, ratherthan objects of a special kind of knowledge which supposedly groundsthe knowledge of all other things. But, to repeat, it is crucial to thisaccount that knowledge of essences is not itself knowledge of objects orentities of any kind, nor grounded in any such knowledge — such asknowledge of our own concepts.

9 Conceptualism and Anti-Realism

Recall that ‘conceptualism’, as I am using this term, is the view that,to that extent that talk about essences is legitimate at all, essences arepurely conceptual in character. On this view, the essence of a kind ofentities K is simply constituted by ‘our’ concept of a K — or, if notby ‘our’ concept, then at least by some thinking being’s concept. Butwhat exactly is a ‘concept’? Well, ‘concept’ in the current context isa philosophical term of art, so it is partly up to us as philosophers tostipulate how we propose to use it. As I have already indicated, I myselfregard a concept as being a way of thinking of some thing or things, andI take it that conceptualists can agree with me about this. However,as a metaphysical realist, I also want to say that not all of our ways ofthinking of things — not all of our conceptions of things — are equallygood. Because I am a metaphysical realist, I believe that our conceptionsof things may be more or less adequate, in the sense that they may moreor less accurately reflect or represent the natures — that is, the essences

30 E. Jonathan Lowe

— of the things of which we are thinking, or at least attempting tothink. Thus it is open to me to stipulate further that, in my usage, a‘concept’ is precisely an adequate conception of some thing or things,which accurately reflects the nature or essence of the things in question.For example, I can say that a child who conceives of a triangle merelyas being a three-sided shape does not yet fully grasp the concept of atriangle, as a planar figure with three rectilinear sides. Clearly, however,it is not then open to me to say that the essence of Ks is constitutedby our concept of a K, because this would leave no room for me tosay, non-vacuously, that the concept of a K is a conception of Ks thataccurately reflects the essence of Ks. Essences, on my account, mustbe mind-independent, if the question can sensibly be put as to whetheror not a conception of Ks adequately reflects the essence of Ks. Butwhat can be said on behalf of the rival view — conceptualism as I call it— that essences are always constituted by concepts? First, it should beclear, if it isn’t clear already, that conceptualism is a strongly anti-realistview. Second, I want to press home my complaint that conceptualismis a view that is ultimately incoherent. Let us deal with the first pointfirst.

The following question, it seems to me, must be a deeply embarrass-ing one for the conceptualist: in virtue of what, according to conceptu-alism, can it truly be said that there exist entities that fall under, orsatisfy, our concepts — including, most centrally, our sortal or individ-uative concepts? That is to say, what does it take for there to be Ks,on this view? This is simple enough, it may be replied: there must beentities that possess whatever features they are that we have built intoour concept of a K. So, for example, if K is lump of bronze, conceived,let us say, as a maximal connected aggregate of bronze particles, thenthere must be just such things. This will be the case if, sometimes, somebronze particles adhere to one another so as to form a maximal con-nected whole. Well and good: but remember that conceptualism is thedoctrine that all essences are constituted by concepts. So, in particular,the doctrine must be taken to extend to the essence of bronze particles— what it is to be a bronze particle. (It must also extend to the essenceof the relation of adherence, but I won’t dwell on that equally importantfact for the moment, for the concept of adherence is not an individuativeconcept.) Bronze particles, on this view, exist just in case there are somethings that possess whatever features we have built into our concept ofa bronze particle. However, either the concept of a bronze particle is rel-evantly similar to that of a lump of bronze, in that it characterizes thenature of such an entity in terms of properties and relations of entities


of other kinds, or it is not. If it is, then the next question is just pushedback one stage. If it is not — and this is the next question — then whatdoes it take for the world to contain entities falling under the concept?What, in this case, must the world contribute to the fact that entities ofthis putative kind exist? Since, according to conceptualism, all essencesare constituted by concepts — where concepts are understood to be ‘waysof conceiving’ deployed by thinkers — the conceptualist cannot supposethat how the world is, in respect of what kinds of entities it contains,is something that is the case independently of what concepts thinkersdeploy. On this view, what it is for the world to contain entities of akind K just is for the concept of a K to have application, or be appli-cable. Consequently, an adherent of this view cannot cash out what itis for such a concept to have application in terms of there being in theworld entities answering to the concept. For, as I say, on this view, therebeing in the world such entities just is a matter of the concept’s ‘havingapplication’. So a quite different understanding of ‘having application’must at least implicitly be in play.

What is this alternative understanding? I think that it can only besomething like this: the concept of a K ‘has application’ just in casethinkers find it useful, or convenient, to conceive of the world as con-taining Ks. This may require the concept in question to be logicallyconsistent — thus ruling out, for example, the applicability of such con-cepts as ‘round square cupola’ — but otherwise the constraints wouldseem to be purely pragmatic. This, it seems clear, is a deeply anti-realistview. It is a view according to which, in Hilary Putnam’s well-knownwords, there isn’t a ‘ready-made world’ [Putnam 1983] — or, if youlike, there isn’t any truth about ‘what is there anyway ’, to use BernardWilliams’s equally familiar phrase [Williams 1978, 64]. Or, yet again, itis a view according to which, to employ Michael Dummett’s somewhatless felicitous metaphor, reality is an ‘amorphous lump’ — one that canbe ‘sliced up’ in indefinitely many different but equally legitimate ways,depending on what ‘conceptual scheme’ we or other thinkers happen todeploy [Dummett 1981, 563]. It may also be the view to which DavidWiggins is committed, willy-nilly, by the doctrine that he calls ‘concep-tualist realism’ — committed in virtue of the fact that the only notion ofindividuation that he admits is a cognitive one, whereby individuationis a singling out of objects by thinkers [Wiggins 2001, 6]. Not only is thisview deeply anti-realist: it is also, as I have said, doubtfully coherent.For those who philosophize in these terms rarely stop to think abouthow their doctrine is supposed to accommodate thinkers, their thoughts,and the concepts that they deploy. For these, too, are putative kinds

32 E. Jonathan Lowe

of entities, whose essences, according the conceptualist doctrine, mustlike all others be constituted by ‘our’ concepts of them. It is at thispoint that the conceptualist manifestly paints himself into a corner fromwhich there is no escape. There simply is no coherent position to beadopted according to which all essences are constituted by concepts, be-cause concepts themselves are either something or else nothing — theyeither exist or they do not. If they don’t, then conceptualism is out ofbusiness. But if they do, then they themselves have an essence — whatit is to be a concept. The conceptualist, to be consistent, must say thatthe essence of concepts is constituted our concept of a concept. But whatcould this mean? And what could it mean, according to conceptualism,to say that the concept of a concept ‘has application’ — that there areconcepts? I don’t believe that conceptualism has any intelligible answerto such questions. The lesson, I take it, is that at least some essencesmust be mind-independent, in a way that conceptualism denies. Seriousessentialism, as I call it, is my attempt to provide such an account ofessence.

References

Descartes, René

1986 Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham, Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dummett, Michael 1981 Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed.,London: Duckworth.

Fine, Kit

1994 Essence and Modality, in James E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philo-sophical Perspectives, 8: Logic and Language, Atascadero, CA:Ridgeview.

Jackson, Frank

1998 From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analy-sis, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kripke, Saul A.

1971 Identity and Necessity, in M. K. Munitz (ed.), Identity andIndividuation, New York: New York University Press.

1980 Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lewis, David

1991 Parts of Classes, Oxford: Blackwell.

Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism. . . 33

Locke, John

1975 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nid-ditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lowe, E. J.

1998 The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2002 Material Coincidence and the Cinematographic Fallacy: A Re-sponse to Olson, The Philosophical Quarterly 52, 369–72.

2003 Substantial Change and Spatiotemporal Coincidence, Ratio,16, 140–60.

2005a Ontological Dependence, in E. N. Zalta ed., The Stanford En-cyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu.

2005b Identity, Vagueness, and Modality, in J. L. Bermúdez ed.,Thought, Reference, and Experience: Themes from the Philosophyof Gareth Evans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2006 The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation forNatural Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Olson, Eric T.

2001 Material Coincidence and the Indiscernibility Problem, ThePhilosophical Quarterly, 51, 337–55.

Putnam, Hilary

1975 The Meaning of ‘Meaning’, in his Mind, Language and Reality:Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

1983 Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made World, in his Realism and Rea-son: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Quine, W. V.

1969 Existence and Quantification, in his Ontological Relativity andOther Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.

Wiggins, David

2001 Sameness and Substance Renewed, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Williams, Bernard

1978 Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Harmondsworth: Pen-guin.

34

A Realistic and Non Reductionist Strategywith respect to Properties

Sandrine DarselL.H.S.P. - Archives H. Poincaré (UMR 7117)

Résumé : Peut-on et doit-on admettre des propriétés non physiques ? Uneontologie minimale accepte seulement la réalité des propriétés physiques. Elleprend appui sur un critère d’existence restreint : le critère causal. A l’inverse,une ontologie d’accueil affirme la réalité d’au moins certaines propriétés nonphysiques, et conteste par là la validité du critère causal. Le but de cetteinvestigation est de défendre une version modérée du réalisme par rapport auxpropriétés non physiques et de proposer un nouveau critère d’existence : lecritère explicatif.

Abstract: Is it possible and necessary to admit of non-physical properties? Aminimal ontology accepts only the reality of physical properties. It is based ona restrictive existential criterion, namely the causal criterion. On the contrary,a fostering ontology insists that at least some non-physical properties are real,and therefore denies the validity of the causal criterion. The purpose of thisinvestigation is to defend a moderate version of realism with regard to non-physical properties and to suggest a new existential criterion for properties:the explicative criterion.

Properties, that are features, attributes, qualities and characteristicsof things, play an important explanatory role: they are not only meantto explain how general terms apply, but also to take into account theepistemological phenomena such as recognition or classification of newentities, as well as notions such as recurrence, objective resemblance andidentity of nature within the ontological domain. How one conceivesthe explanatory role of properties depends upon how one answer thefollowing three questions that may be raised regarding their nature:

1. What is the condition for their existence?

2. Can we determine an identity criterion for properties?

3. What kinds of properties should we accept?


36 Sandrine Darsel

The opinions suggested here focuses on this last question. From a generalrealistic point of view which claims the existence of properties1, we willask ourselves which ontological option of the various kinds of propertiesis the most consistent: a minimal ontology based on a restrictive exis-tential criterion or a fostering ontology that contests the validity of thiscriterion.

If we consider ordinary speech, declares attributes to objects, personsand situations, which typically denote the properties (from a realisticpoint of view) are various: “being a dog”, “being rectangular”, “being vir-tuous”, “being delicate”, “being sad”, “being straight”, “being blue”, “beingelastic”, “being beautiful”. . . But do we have to assume the existence ofthese different types of properties, or is it better to restrict the propertiesto one family? Should we and could we do without non-physical prop-erties (set of properties not admitted by physics)? Is an ontology thataccepts only physical properties (set of properties admitted by physicsor reduced to these properties) sufficient to account for concrete familiarentities? Can non-physical statements be truly objective? If so, whatare their truth conditions? And finally, can we say that there are non-physical properties that explain the meaning of non-physical statements?

A minimal ontology is a localised form of anti-realism: only someproperties — physical properties — exist. Thus, no entity is beautiful,virtuous, coherent or frightening... This anti-realistic strategy is basedupon a causal criterion of existence according to which the quantifica-tion of properties is necessary only in causal contexts: to assert theexistence of an entity, it is necessary and sufficient that this entity isincluded in causal interactions; non-physical properties which by defi-nition are not reduced to physical properties, do not have any part incausal explanations; therefore, it is ontologically excessive and uncon-vincing to accept non-physical properties. From a semantic point ofview, anti-realism assumes either the non-descriptivist hypothesis thatnon-physical statements are only the expression of subjective attitudes,or the descriptivist hypothesis that such statements have a propositionalcontent. This idea is combined with a theory of general error — allnon-physical statements are false — or with a reductionist theory —physical properties are the truth conditions of such statements — orwith a subjectivist and relativist theory — non-physical predicates havea private meaning. Whereby the epistemological consequence: our ordi-nary discussions about non-physical topics (moral, axiological, aesthetic,psychological. . . ) are meaningless and useless.

1Realism with regard to properties is opposed to nominalism, which does notaccept the existence of properties.

A Realistic and Non Reductionnist Strategy. . . 37

Against anti-realism about non-physical properties, we will argue theobjective reality of them: non-physical statements, if they are true, referto properties of entities and expose fundamental aspects of the world.The line of argumentation for such a realistic strategy will be dividedinto two steps. The first part will be an evaluation of the anti-realistclaim of the truth. Their semantic and ontological presuppositions willbe examined. In the second part of this thinking, we will be defendinga realistic and non-reductionist strategy about non-physical properties:objects, to which we correctly give attributes, possess these properties.The descriptivist hypothesis that non-physical statements have truthconditions will be articulated with a moderate version of non-reductionistrealism: revision of the existential criterion of properties, affirmationof the principle of instantiation — properties ontologically depend onparticular objects to which they belong —, relational analysis of non-physical properties, and finally acknowledging of the supervenience ofnon-physical properties on physical properties.

The aim of this paper is not to put forward a complete metaphysicsof properties, but to stress the consistence and advantages of a realisticand non-reductionism conception with regard to non-physical proper-ties. By endorsing this ontological option, it is possible to overcome thedifficulties of anti-realism (whether it being reductionist or not) aboutnon-physical properties. It leads to a vast ontological investigation re-garding mental, moral, aesthetic and axiological properties.

1 Minimal ontology and localisedanti-realism

Physicalism according to which irreducible non-physical properties arepseudo-properties, can be based on two different arguments:

a) A semantic argument: non-physical statements are de-void of descriptive function. They don’t have any truthconditions.

b) An ontological argument: even if non-physical state-ments are descriptions, non-physical properties are notwhat make them true.

38 Sandrine Darsel

1.1 The semantic argument

When a subject S says “The Prelude n◦2 op.28 of Chopin expresses ange”,this statement does not describe the musical work and does not predicateany properties to it. This type of statement cannot be true in the sameway as factual statements like “The musical performance by SamsonFrançois lasts 3 minutes and 12 seconds”. A non-physical statement islike an interjection (“hurrah!”): it has no propositional content and tellsnothing about the world. This hypothesis could be supported in twodifferent ways: either on the basis of the emotivist conception2, or onthe basis of the prescriptivist conception3.

According to the first version, the syntactical form of non-physicalstatements masks their real function: they function primarly to expressemotion (considered as a non-cognitive mental state) and also to arousesimilar emotions in others. Non-physical statements do not have anytruth conditions: they do not describe any of the world’s aspects4. Andwhen an emotivist says that a non-physical statement expresses an emo-tional attitude, he means that this sentence expresses an attitude withoutsaying that we have the attitude. Thus, Simon Blackburn distinguishesthe description of things by means of natural factual statements fromtheir evaluation (in a wide sense) in terms of what is good, bad, funnyand delicate. . . A moral statement such as “This action is generous” doesnot describe the action, or the agent, or the speaker, but it is simplythe expression of the speaker’s feelings. Far from describing features ofthe world, non-physical statements are the expression of our feelings andemotions [Blackburn 1998, 49]. And these emotions are mental eventsdevoid of cognitive content.

In the previous case, non-physical statements prescribed, called forsome feelings or attitudes about the considered entity. A seeminglynon-physical declarative statement expresses in reality a preference withuniversal vocation that takes the form of an imperative. This analysisis called “normative-expressive” and was developed by Allan Gibbard[Gibbard 1990, 8–10]: to say that something is frightening is not toassert a fact but to accept the stipulated norms in that situation, whichis fear. The norms constitute a system of permissions and demands. Themain argument in favour of prescriptivism is:

2A.J Ayer and C.L Stevenson developed emotivism in ethics.3R.M. Hare defends prescriptivism in ethics.4Stevenson distinguishes about axiological predicates a primary meaning, which

is purely evaluative, and a secondary meaning, which is descriptive. But the primarymeaning is the real function of axiological predicates.


i Descriptivism leads to relativism because the meaningof the affective terms is not rigid: it varies from oneperson to another, from one society to another and fromone time to another.

ii But, relativism must be denied.

iii So, descriptivism is false: it must be replaced with pre-scriptivism [Virvidakis 2004, 102].

These two conceptions admit that non-physical statements have somestrength, but they diverge about how to specify this strength: emotionalfunction or prescriptive function. The non-descriptivist hypothesis em-phasis the descriptivist illusion carried by non-physical statements. Ithas three consequences. Firstly, non-physical statements have emotionalinfluence, a form of magnetism: there are stimuli that have the causaldisposition to provoke some emotions [Adams 1950, 315]. Secondly, non-physical disagreements are simulated: they are not disagreements aboutthe considered entity but are disagreements between non-cognitive atti-tudes. Thus, no non-physical statement is false: these kinds of judge-ments in their capacity of non-cognitive attitudes do not contradict eachother. As a consequence, a resolution of the disagreement does not con-sist in exchanging arguments but in successful attitude shifting [Dreier1999, 563]. Finally, the given cognitive reasons — for example, an expla-nation of musical expression in terms of the tonality, tempo, structure,etc. of a musical piece — are causally but not logically linked with non-physical judgements. The given reasons do not make these judgementsmore or less correct [Stevenson 1950, 303].

Nevertheless, the non-descriptivist hypothesis is based upon an inde-fensible semantics and epistemology: the assumption of a semantic du-alism between factual statements and axiological statements5, the claimthat non-physical judgements cannot be mistaken6, so the problem ofrelativism, and lastly, the identification of emotions with private men-tal events devoid of cognitive content. Moreover, the non-descriptivist

5Various features of the way we think and talk support the idea that axiologicalstatements are genuinely truth-evaluable. In fact, it is clear that people do generallyregard their axiological claims, and the axiological claims of others, as purporting toreport facts. Thus, the contrast between axiological and factual statements cannot bedrawn in terms of whether the claims are truth-evaluable. The non-descriptivist mustexplain why axiological claims mimic so well factual claims, and offer an alternativeaccount of the difference between axiological and factual statements. In the absenceof such an explanation, the non-desciptivist has no distinctive thesis.

6It is semantically appropriate for someone to utter a non-physical judgementwhenever he wants to express a non-cognitive attitude.

40 Sandrine Darsel

conclusions as well as its premises are weak. In the first place, ratio-nal explanation is confused with causal explanation: the reasons thatallegedly justify or revise a non-physical judgement are not what causesit. To maintain that murder is not morally good is to take on a com-mitment to this assertion. And so, it is possible to give logical reasonsconnected with this judgement. Secondly, the non-descriptivist hypothe-sis faces the “Frege-Geach problem”: it cannot explain why non-physicalstatements may take a non-assertive form (interrogative, conditional,negative). Consider the following line of argumentation:

i If murder is wrong, then letting your little brother mur-der people is wrong.

ii Murder is wrong.

iii Then letting your little brother murder people is wrong.

The problem for the non-descriptivist is that he must accept a differenceof status between premises (i) and (ii): it assigns two different semanticfunctions to the same statement according to the context (whether as-sertive or not). Thus, premise (ii) must work (for the non-descriptivist)as the arousal of an attitude — to be ashamed — and not as the as-sertion of a statement. But premise (i) doesn’t assume the arousal ofan attitude: it has a propositional content. This contradiction conteststhe validity of this reasoning that is based upon the principle (exposedby Frege) of identity for conditional or asserted propositions. Therefore,in order to avoid these difficulties, we must accept that non-physicalstatements have a descriptive function.

Nevertheless, it might be suggested that deflationism about truth canride to the rescue of anti-realism. In fact, according to the deflationarytheory of truth, non-physical statements have a content — at the con-trary of non-descriptivism — but their content are not true or false in arobust sense : they can be true or false in a deflationary sense, that is toassert that non-physical statement is true is just to assert the statementitself. For example, to say that “Fred is generous” is true is equivalentsimply to sayins that Fred is generous. Deflationism can be understandby contrast with the correspondence theory of truth according to wichtruth consists in a relation to some portion of reality (to be specified)— for example, the truth of the statement that Fred is generous consistsin its correspondence to the fact that Fred is generous. Deflationismcould bypass the above objection, the Frege-Geach problem, because itgenerates a minimal truth condition for any meaningful indicative sen-tence. But deflationism with regard to non-physical statements impli-cates that minimal truth conditions for non-physical statements can be


distinguished from more robust truth conditions: there is to be a justi-fied division of discourse into minimal truth-pat conditions and robusttruth-apt conditions. But, no justification is furnished for this division.Moreover and much more broadly, deflationism is inconsistent with thecorrespondence intuition that explains the notion of truth with regardto physical and non-physical statements, by appeal to the notions of cor-respondence and fact. Finally, it is difficult for a deflationary theory oftruth to consider truth as a norm of assertion.

1.2 Ontological argument

In the framework of a robust theory of truth, descriptivism does not im-ply realism about non-physical properties. Anti-realism of non-physicalproperties could take three different forms:

a Theory of general error

Every non-physical statement is false.

i In fact, this type of statement attributes some non-physical properties to the objects.

ii But these properties do not exist: only physical proper-ties are real.

iii So, every non-physical statement is systematically anduniformly false.

Consequently, there is nothing in the world answering to our non-physicalstatements: no facts or properties render these judgements true. Psy-chological, aesthetic, axiological and moral (etc.) propositions, all ofthem are false; and only physical judgements can be true. According toa defender of the theory of general error, this theory does not necessar-ily have consequences for the practice of making axiological judgements.But, as Wright’s argument shows [Wright 1996, 2], this theory considersthat axiological discourse is bad faith: it is not consistent combining theidea that axiological discourse is serious and useful, with the negativeclaim of the error-theory.

b Physicalist reductionism

Some non-physical statements are true. But the true conditions ofthese statements are, in fine, physical properties. For example, the men-tal disposition “to be sad” is reducible to a disjunctive set of physicalproperties (cerebral states or bodily states). So, non-physical statementsdo not give specific information about the considered entity: it is possibleto replace non-physical statements by physical statements.

42 Sandrine Darsel

c Subjectivism and relativismAll non-physical statements are true because they denote the way

the considered entity looks for us. Non-physical statements attributephenomenal and subjective properties to the object. Then, the real sub-ject of the description is not the considered entity but the speaker, hisfeelings, his ideas, etc. It is important to consider the difference be-tween subjectivism and emotivism: the second admits that non-physicalstatements express feelings, the first that they describe feelings. A non-physical statement like “X is A′’ where X is an object, and A a non-physical predicate, means, “S feels the A when he looks at X”: thenon-physical property attributed to X is a psychological property at-tributed to the subject S. So, the proposition “X is A” is true if andonly if a subject which perceives or conceives X, feels A or a matchingemotion. Non-physical properties are relative; and subjective projectionsand non-physical terms have private meanings7. Due to the (supposed)first person’s authority, no non-physical statement can be revised: theyare incorrigible. Consequently, non-physical argumentations and dis-agreements are simulated.

The validity of these conceptions8 is based upon an ontological pre-supposition: physicalist monism according to which only physical prop-erties are real and objective properties. But what is “physicalist monism”?

Physicalist monism adopts a causal criterion of existence: quantifi-cation of properties is necessary in causal contexts [Shoemaker 1980,234–235].

i In order to accept the existence of a property, it is nec-essary and sufficient that this property is integrated incausal interactions.

ii Irreducible non-physical properties are causally inert.

iii So, it is ontologically excessive to accept non-physicalproperties.

What is a causally relevant property? Real properties have two charac-teristics: they are natural and intrinsic. For property F to be a natural

7The words of the non-physical language are to refer to what only can be knownto the speaker, which is to his immediate and private sensations. Thus, it is alanguage comprehensible only to its single originator: the characteristics, which defineits non-physical vocabulary, are inaccessible to others. So, another speaker cannotunderstand its language. But, there cannot be such a language: sharability is neces-sary to meaning. The concept’s meaning is not reducible to an internal mental stateof the concept’s user.

8It is not a necessary presupposition for the subjectivist conception, though widelyheld.


property, it is sufficient that F is part of causal laws. A property is in-trinsic (or non-relational) if the entity has this property regardless of itsrelation with anything else. The true value of an authentic judgementis independent of human classification. Thus, this realism about prop-erties is selective and minimalist. It is an a posteriori scientific realismarticulated with physicalism: the complete inventory of real propertiesis established by (achieved) physics, which is the science of natural lawshaving natural properties for relata.

Does localised anti-realism combined with descriptivism constitute agood alternative to non-descriptivism? Firstly what of the strategy byelimination? Non-physical properties are projections of the mind. Theyare not properties of objects. Erroneous attributions of non-physicalproperties are reducible to social practices, that is to vocabulary’s learn-ing in a specific language. Thus, nothing in the world legitimises theattribution of this non-physical predicate rather than another. Onlythe projection frequency of that predicate explicates the attribution ofthis predicate rather than another [Goodman 1954, 12]. However, nojustification is given in favour of the idea that moral, aesthetic and psy-chological (etc.) experiences are constitutively illusory: the strategy byelimination has to split (arbitrarily) perception in a neutral relation - forexample, to look at a tree - and a relation of quasi-fascination - to seethat tree as beautiful. But, to perceive a tree as beautiful is one and onlyone perception, which is a fine aspectual perception: there is not a per-ception and an illusory interpretation, which is added to this perception.This aesthetic perception is genuinely a perception, which requires thatan aspect — the beauty of the tree — is really perceived9. Moreover,this anti-realistic strategy makes two questionable reductions. Firstly,that the attribution of non-physical properties is based on a commandof language game does not entail that non-physical properties are notreal. Secondly, real properties are not necessarily intrinsic properties10,but the eliminative assumes without justification that the distinction be-tween real property and pseudo-property coincides with the distinction

9And if for exemple, I see a tree as beautiful and after as reassuring, it is twodifferent aspectual perceptions and not one perception interpreted in two differentways.

10For example, it is possible to consider that the authenticity of a work of art is areal extrinsic property: a passport is authentic under an attribution, then authenticityis not an intrinsic property; authenticity is not a simili-property that is a relative,exclusively phenomenal property; authenticity is not reducible to an intrinsic property(if there are two passports, one authentic and the other a copy, and it is impossibleto distinguish between the two an extrinsic property makes one the original and theother a fake). I will defend the possibility of real extrinsic properties in the nextchapter.

44 Sandrine Darsel

between intrinsic property and extrinsic property.

Does the strategy by reduction avoid these difficulties? Accordingto this hypothesis, real non-physical properties are reducible to physicalproperties. The identity between real non-physical properties and phys-ical properties is either type-identity or token-identity. To consider theconsistency of reductionist strategy, it’s necessary to examine the notionof reduction: what is reduction of non-physical properties?

The first way to understand the notion of reduction is that the rela-tion of strong supervenience guarantees reduction. Strong supervenienceentails that there is no difference in supervenient properties without dif-ference in basic properties: a set of properties A supervenes upon anotherset B just in case there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference,that is if and only if a difference in A-properties requires a differencein B-properties11. Nevertheless, supervenience is consistent with emer-gence: from the supervenience of M upon P , we cannot conclude to thereduction of M to P , though reduction, as such, requires supervenience.In fact, reduction requires property identity (identity of non-physicalproperties with physical properties), so even supervenience with logicalnecessity is not sufficient for reduction of non-physical properties.

In order to save the naturalization of non-physical properties, anotherconstraint is introduced: reduction of non-physical properties consists inexplanation of non-physical properties in terms of physical propertiesand not only in property identity; reduction is the explanation of a setof higher-order properties by a set of basic properties. The logical deriva-tion of the former from the latter requires two formal conditions: con-nect ability and derivability [Nagel 1961, 353–354]. Then, a defender ofanti-realism with respect to non-physical properties has to establish ex-planatory bridge laws, which should be considered to express some kindof identity relation. But, difficulties with reduction arise because of sin-gular limits [Berry 2002, 10–11] the idea that non-physical descriptionscould (and must) be replaced with physical descriptions is questionable:it is possible that some non-physical descriptions have a new explana-tory role, and that the higher-order properties are not fully explainablein terms of basic properties. The fundamental set of properties (physi-cal properties) can be self explanatorily deficient: there are phenomenawhose explanations require reference to a set of non-physical properties.

Nevertheless, reduction could be analysed in terms of causal identity.A property is realised by a basic property if and only if the set of thepotential causal powers of the superior property is a subset of the po-

11Thus, supervenience claim has modal force.


tential causal powers of the basic property [Wilson 1999, 42]. So, thereduction of M to P is possible because M ’s extension is identical to P ’sextension. But the condition of co-extension isn’t sufficient for an onto-logical reduction: when ontological reduction is an assertion about whatis real and what is not real, the relation of co-extension, as a symmet-rical relation, does not entail a difference of status. If the properties M

and P fulfil the condition of co-extension, how do we determine, betweenM and P , the reduced term and the reductionism term? It is often aprejudice in favour of physicalism that determines physical properties asbasic properties, combined with the idea of multiple realisability12.

The last option, for the localised anti-realist, is to conceive reductionas a relation between the whole and its parts. Reduction is a rela-tion of composition, which is not symmetrical: the parts of the wholeare more fundamental than the whole; the whole can be reduced to itsparts. This option defends a mereological conception of composition,which supposes extensionalism13 and mereological atomism14. But twoobjections against this solution emerge. First, the idea of composition’sontological innocence according to which the whole is identical to itsparts, is questionable. A structure cannot be reduced to its constitutivematerial: for example, a musical structure cannot be reduced to its parts(sounds) and its parts cannot be identified without the structure (a tonalchange modifies the part’s function). Second, this option makes confu-sion between a real entity and a fundamental entity (i.e. a basic entitywhich is ontologically independent with respect to another entity of thesame type)15. But what is real is not necessary fundamental: a real en-tity could ontologically depend of a fundamental entity; and ontologicaldependence is not sufficient for ontological reduction.

2. An economical and non-reductionist strategy

The failure of physicalism calls for a revision of the existential crite-rion of properties and a reconsideration of the first question: how can wedetermine the nature of real properties? The purpose of metaphysics ofproperties, as a metaphysical theory, is to describe what kinds of prop-erties there are and to give a conceptual analysis of ordinary concepts.This analysis is constrained by common sense beliefs. Thus, metaphysicsis a modest discipline, which takes as an object our ordinary beliefs of

12Many different physical properties could underlie the same non-physical property.13Two entities are identical if their extensions are identical.14The parts are first with regard to the whole.15For example, a physical property is fundamental because it doesn’t depend on

other properties (though it depends of a substantial particular); a non-physical prop-erty is not fundamental because it has to have existential condition to supervene onphysical properties.

46 Sandrine Darsel

what things are, their essential or accidental way of being. If we startwith common sense, causal explanation is not the only reason to believein the existence of properties: it is an inference to the best explana-tion. Thus, the explanatory criterion can replace the causal one as anexistential criterion of properties.

i Properties are accepted to explain from a semantic pointof view, the applicability of general terms, but also epis-temological phenomena like identification or classifica-tion of new entities and lastly, in the ontological domain,recurrence, objective resemblance or identity of nature.

ii At least, some irreducible non-physical properties likeaesthetic, psychological and moral properties play animportant role in those three domains.

iii So it is necessary to accept (at least) the reality of someirreducible non-physical properties.

Thus, if we want to explain the meaning of ordinary discussions, weneed a large selection of properties. In fact, properties not only explaincausation and laws of nature, but they also have other explanatory roles.According to the existential criterion supported here: for properties, toexist is to have an authentic role with a view to the best explanationof the nature of entities. The explanatory criterion, unlike the causalcriterion, is ontologically neutral and could take common sense into ac-count. The explanatory criterion doesn’t tell us what types of proper-ties are real: it is necessary to wonder every time if a type of propertyis irreplaceable. Therefore, the explanatory criterion requires to deter-mine a posteriori what is a relevant and necessary explanation: whenthe distinctive nature of a phenomena cannot be directly characterizedand explained in terms of the resources of the basic physical theory andrequires us to make use of a set of non-physical properties, these non-physical properties must be known as real properties.

This existential criterion is combined with a coarse-grained criterionof individuation: properties are not individuated as finely as linguisticterms, which denote them. Each predicate does not correspond to aproperty. For example, the property being red and square is not distinctfrom the property being square and red. Two alleged properties are iden-tical just in case they give exactly the same explanation, that is theyconfer the same explanatory roles on their instances.

The argumentation in favour of a realistic but economical strategyconnects these criteria with the following principles: the principle of


instantiation [Armstrong 1978], the possibility of a relational analysis[Pettit 1991 587–626], and the non-reductionist supervenience of non-physical properties16.

2.1 The principle of instantiation

Only properties, which are instantiated by particulars, exist. Forproperties, to exist is to be instantiated. The principle of instantiationmaintains that there are no transcendent properties. There is an ontolog-ical dependence of properties with regard to particulars and a semanticaldependence of particulars with regard to properties. Instantiation is likethe fulfilment of a function by an argument: it is not a relation. It’s ametaphysical adhesive: it is not necessary to introduce another term to“affix” the properties and the particular object which instantiates them.

Concreta particulars are ultimate constituents of the world. Due tothe ontological dependence of properties with regard to particulars, realnon-physical properties do not introduce an ontological difference of theultimate constituents: a description of the world which does not refer toaesthetic, psychological or moral properties, passes over some essentialor accidental ways of being of entities but no entity.

1.3 The relational analysis

A real property is not necessarily intrinsic: it could be extrinsic or re-lational. An intrinsic property is a property, which an entity possessesindependently of its relations with other things. An extrinsic propertyis a property that an entity possesses in virtue of its relations with otherthings. The relational characteristic of a property does not implicate itssubjectivity or its unreality. This idea is due to confusion of what wemean by “intrinsi”. This term can take two different meanings: either, ina loose sense, an intrinsic property is a property possessed by the consid-ered entity (it’s a property of its own); or, in the strict sense, an intrinsicproperty is a property possessed by the considered entity independentlyof its relations with other things. Relational or extrinsic properties are“intrinsic” one in the loose sense but not in the strict sense.

Consider for example the aesthetic property “to have a pastoral fea-tur” granted to Goldberg Variation n◦22 of J.S Bach. The terms of therelation are some physico-phenomenal properties of the musical work onthe one hand, and a person having some dispositions (beliefs, emotions,etc.) in standard conditions of perception (related to the kind of musicalwork in question) on the other. The Goldberg Variation n◦22 possesses

16For moral properties, see Ogien, 1999; for aesthetic properties, see Pouivet, 2006.

48 Sandrine Darsel

the aesthetic property “to have a pastoral characteristic” if this work isperceived as having this property by a listener (actual or hypothetical)in appropriate conditions of perception. The conceptual link betweenthis property and the fact, to be understood as such does not implicatethe reduction of the aesthetic property to the experience of the listener.Aesthetic properties do not transcend our cognitive capacities; neverthe-less, they are real. So we have to distinguish between the two types ofobjectivity [John Mcdowell 1985, 253]: a strong objectivity, which impli-cates independence from every human response and a weak objectivity,which only requires independence from particular human responses.

Standard conditions of perception, which are subjected to public cri-teria, guarantee the correction of perception. They include a set of con-cepts, some historical and cultural knowledge, an education of the senses,and a familiarity with this kind of work, etc. It is difficult to determinethese standard conditions of observation, hence the difficulty to guar-antee the attribution of non-physical properties and the epistemologicaldistinction between non-physical properties and physical properties: itis easier to attribute physical properties than non-physical properties.

1.4 The non-reductionist supervenience

That some non-physical properties are irreducible does not mean theyhave no connection with physical properties. The irreducibility of somenon-physical properties does not implicate the absence of link betweenphysical and non-physical properties. Non-physical properties superveneglobally on physical properties and emerge from them17. In this sense,supervenience is not ontologically innocent: non-physical properties aresomething over and above physical ones; it is a global supervenience be-cause it is impossible to determine a set of basic properties from whichwe could predict the instantiation of a non-physical property. Thus, itis impossible to determine a set of sufficient basic properties from whichwe could predict the instantiation of a non-physical property. For exam-ple, the possession of the property “being frightening” could depend onvarious subvenient properties and from the knowledge of the subvenientproperties, it is not possible to know the supervenient property. Thesupervenience of non-physical properties on physical properties does notentail their ontological reduction: they are qualitatively different. Butemergent properties are not mysterious: they result from an interactionbetween subvenient properties.

17As I have shown on page 10-11, supervenience doesn’t entail reduction and isconsistent with emergence.


In summary, a real property is an authentic property, which reallyexists and is irreducible to another property or a set of properties. Areal property is not necessarily fundamental (independent of other prop-erties): there are basic or subvenient properties and supervenient prop-erties. Moreover, a real property is not necessarily intrinsic: there areintrinsic and extrinsic properties. And lastly, a real property is a prop-erty, which plays an irreplaceable explanatory role.

2 Conclusion

We have good reasons to believe in the existence of at least some non-physical properties. In fact, the anti-realistic hypothesis under its variousforms, encounters several difficulties. Moreover, the realistic hypothesisis a coherent option. It explains the descriptive content of non-physicalstatements and the fact that such statements could be asserted, denied,or reappraised. It takes into account the normativity of non-physicalstatements. Notions of correctness and truth are implied in ordinarynon-physical judgements: it is not possible that two opposite moraljudgements are at the same time true; a moral judgement can be false.Moreover, non-physical disagreements, like scientific disagreements, canreally be resolved: the question “Is this action [torture] morally good?”has the same status as the question “Is the theory of evolution betterthan creationism?” Consequently, the realistic non-reductionist strategyexplains two ordinary beliefs. On the one hand, we take part in dis-cussions; we make some argumentations and give justifications when wetalk about moral, aesthetics, etc. On the other hand, some discussionsare easier to resolve than others. Lastly, the anti-realistic objection thatnon-physical properties are epiphenomenal, that is causally inert, is notradical: it can be assumed that it is a categorial error to attribute toproperties causal powers. What has causal powers is an object in virtueof its properties. This problem is due to a reification of properties; butproperties cannot be separate to their object which in turn instantiatesthem. So, properties do not have causal powers but only the objects ofwhich properties ontologically depend on do.

The realistic strategy defended here is distinct from dualism (hypoth-esis according to which two incommensurable realities exist) and natu-ralism (hypothesis which progressively eliminates non-physical proper-ties). Against dualism, this strategy accepts that non-physical propertiesdepend on physical properties. Against naturalism, realism maintainsthat some non-physical properties have an irreplaceable explanatory role.

50 Sandrine Darsel

This strategy avoids a problematic ontology (there are two separate re-alities) and an impoverished epistemology (only physical descriptions ofthe world are valid)18.

It is also distinct from radical realism. Realism can take variousforms. It depends on two variables: the kind(s) of non-physical proper-ties which are accepted and the way of being of these properties.! Radicalrealism with regard to non-physical properties is the thesis according towhich 1) every non-physical predicate corresponds to a real non-physicalproperty, and (or) 2) non-physical properties are real because they areintrinsic. A radical realist can admit the proposition (1) and deny (2),or vice versa. On the contrary, moderate realism with regard to non-physical properties is the thesis of 1’) a coarse-grained criterion of indi-viduation for properties and in particular non-physical properties, and2’) a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. The line ofargumentation defended in this investigation articulates 1’) with 2’). Toconclude, realism about some non-physical properties does not entail anontological profusion of properties, or a misrepresentation of the relationsbetween physical properties and non-physical properties.

18According to Fodor, “emergence” is an epistemological and not metaphysical cat-egory (though it does not use the language of emergence, it defends this view): emer-gent properties are features of systems governed by generalizations within a specialscience irreductible to physical theory. Therefore, it is possible to defend an epistemol-ogy not reduced to physics in another version than to defend this one. Nevertheless,the advantage of the latter from the former is that it does not reduce explanation tocausal explanation.

AR

ealistican

dN

onR

eduction

nist

Strategy

...51

ASynoptic

View

Semantics of non-physical statements

Non-descriptivism

Emotivism Prescriptivism

Descriptivism

Robust theory of truth

Realism

Radical version Moderate version

Anti-realism

Theory ofgeneral error

Physicalistreductionism

Subjectivism &relativism

Deflationism

52 Sandrine Darsel

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56

Metaphysics of Axiological Realism

Dariusz Łukasiewicz

Kaziemierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz (Poland)

Résumé : L’article présente les propositions principales de la métaphysiquedu réalisme axiologique de Tadeusz Czeżowski, l’un des représentants éminentsde l’École de Lvov-Varsovie. La thèse soutenue par Czeżowski est que les va-leurs ne sont pas des propriétés de n’importe quel genre, mais qu’elles consti-tuent des notions transcendentales au sens de Duns Scot (et pas au sens deThomas d’Aquin). Une des conséquences de cette position est que le réalismede Czeżowski a la forme d’un non-naturalisme. La position prise par Czeżowskin’est pas tout à fait claire ni élaborée en détails ; pour des raisons discutéesdans le présent texte, il est possible de considérer les valeurs comme des sortesd’états de choses non-naturels, qui sont les correspondants des phrases axiolo-giques pertinentes.

Abstract: The paper presents the main assumptions of the metaphysics ofaxiological realism of Tadeusz Czeżowski, one of the eminent representatives ofthe Lvov-Warsaw School. Czeżowski’s major thesis is that values are not prop-erties of any kind, but they are transcendental concepts in the understandingof Duns Scotus (and not that of Thomas Aquinas). One of the consequencesof such a view is that his realism has a form of non-naturalism. Czeżowski’sposition is not completely clear and elaborated in all details; it is possible, forsome reasons discussed in the text, to regard values as a kind of non-naturalstates of affairs which are correlates of relevant axiological propositions.

1 Introduction

The aim of this paper is to present the application of Czeżowski’s meta-physics to the defense of axiological realism understood as a form ofmetaphysical realism1. Axiological realism held by Czeżowski is anoriginal combination of the medieval metaphysics, Brentanism and non-naturalism. Axiological realism is a view which can be defined as anegation of axiological antirealism. Axiological antirealism claims that


1Tadeusz Czeżowski ( 1889-1981) was one of the closest pupils of Kazimierz Twar-dowski, the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. For more information on the Lvov-Warsaw School see [Woleński 1989].

58 Dariusz Łukasiewicz

axiological propositions: evaluations and norms do not have any logicalvalues or that they are always false (as error-theory claims), and thatvalues are not in the things of themselves, but they are rather mere pro-jections; they are just feelings that we project onto the world. Axiologicalrealism has two forms: naturalism and non-naturalism.

Axiological non-naturalism was for Czeżowski the only possible op-tion since he was convinced that axiological propositions are true or false,and it is impossible to infer axiological propositions from natural propo-sitions, that is propositions representing natural facts (in other words itis not possible to “deduce” values from being).

2 The reasons of realism and non-naturalism

The evidence that axiological propositions have one of two logical valuesis delivered by the analysis of language and the usage of the expressionsrepresenting logical values; ‘it is true that. . . ’ and ‘it is false that. . . ’.Czeżowski made a very simple observation that the propositions ‘Truth-fulness is good’ and ‘It is true that truthfulness is good’ are meaningful[Czeżowski 1989, 144].

It is also worth noting that the best known explanation of the exis-tence of inferences in the domain of axiological discourse consists in theassumption that axiological sentences have logical values whose bearersare propositions. As an example of the inference in the domain of ax-iological discourse may serve the following reasoning [Czeżowski 1989,107]:

(P1) If truthfulness is good, then one shall tell the truth.

(P2) Truthfulness is good.Then:

(3) One shall tell the truth.

Since Czeżowski, like the whole tradition to which he belonged, re-jected the deflationist conception of truth and approved of the classicaldefinition of truth, he could not neglect the linguistic facts previouslymentioned, and he had to find an adequate truth-maker for axiologicalsentences. Thus, it is clear that Czeżowski was perfectly aware of “Frege’spoint” or “Searle’s problem”2 Czeżowski, like many other thinkers, waspersuaded by Moore that correct deduction of axiological propositions

2Peter Geach made it clear that we believe that the status of an argument as valid

Metaphysics of Axiological Realism 59

from natural ones is impossible. The crucial thing here was Moore’swarning against ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ based on his famous ‘openquestion argument’3. Czeżowski never analyzed that argument but heaccepted it without reservation. However, Czeżowski could not acceptthe metaphysics of axiological realism defended by Moore because forMoore expressions relevant to axiological discourse, for example ‘good’,‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘valuable’ and their synonyms, are predicates denotingsimple, indefinable, and, in Brentanian terms, ‘unpresentable’ object’sproperties, that is properties which, as Hume and Kant would say, ‘makeno addition’ to the object.

3 The concept of property

Let us note that there is no standard understanding of property in theBrentanist metaphysics, for example, Meinong distinguishes propertiesin an object (Sosein) (object’s constituents or parts, in terms of clas-sical metaphysics: ‘accidents’) and properties of an object (Sein) or,in Findlay’s and Parsons’ terms, “nuclear” properties (like for examplegreen, round) and “extranuclear” properties like existent/non-existent,simple/complex, possible/impossible. Brentano himself rejected proper-ties as an ontological category altogether [Chrudzimski 2004].

A property in the Czeżowskian psycho-ontology is understood as a

depends, at least in part, on the words not shifting in meaning as we move frompremise to premise. However, if there is no common thing predicated by relevantsentences, it is hard to see what their meanings have in common in the context ofa given argument. This is what Geach has called The Frege Point, but it has beenalso called Frege/Geach/Searle Problem in honor of its earliest discussants [Lenman2004]. Geach also observed that “A thought may have just the same content whetheryou assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, nowunasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition” [Geach 1965, 449].Geachprovided the following example of reasoning:

(1) If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your brother to do it is bad.

(2) Tormenting the cat is bad.And, hence,

(3) Getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad.

3Moore reasons: if axiological properties were identical with natural properties,then it would be odd to ask: “I know this activity is pleasurable, but is it morallygood?” After all, if being pleasurable just is the property of being morally good,then to ask this would be like asking, “I know this activity is pleasurable, but it ispleasurable”. Since the original question is ‘open’ rather than silly or self answering,the identity must not obtain. Since exactly the same point can be made regarding anyputative identity between a moral property and a natural property, Moore concludesthat no such identity is possible [Lenman, 2004].


constituent of an object, which is distinguished in an object by the pro-cess of abstraction (abstraction is the process of the mental analysis ofan object). It can be thought of an object (represented) by a subject,or we may also say that a property is a presentable constituent of anobject [Czeżowski 1938, 31]4. The picture below illustrates Czeżowski’sclassification of properties.

properties

sensorial

simple(gree,white)

complex(red andwhite)

non-sensorial

simple,(equality,duration)

complex(relation, square)

The ontology of properties is, as has been mentioned above, closelyrelated to the ontology of mind defended by Czeżowski, and the crucialrole is played here by the notion of presentation. In Czeżowski’s view,a presentation may be a sense perception, which directly brings object’snatural properties before the mind (an intuitive act), or it may be adiscursive and abstract act bringing a given property before the mindby for example a definition [Czeżowski 1959, 35–36]5. The domain ofpresentations may be illustrated as follows.

4It does not mean that a property is a kind of entia rationis, a fiction or only aproduct of mental operations. However, the concept of property and the concept ofindividual (substance) are not absolute metaphysical categories but they are ratherrelative concepts. A substance is, according to Czeżowski, the referent of a sentence’ssubject (proper names, definite description or deictic expressions). Thus, a propertyof a substance is a constituent of the referent of a specific linguistic expression. Asubstance is not, however, a linguistic construction (and hence a property is not sucha construct either). The essential role in the determination of which entity is thereferent of a relevant linguistic expression is played by the spatial-temporal positionof the entity which candidates to the role of the substance. A substance does not lackits own immanent constituents and, therefore, it is not a thing in Brentano’s reisticsense, but it is not a class of qualities as Mach held, either. A substance is a wholecomposed of constituents which can be grasped by means of mental analysis.

5Concepts are symbolic, which means that they present objects indirectly bymeans of signs of a natural or a technical language. Concepts are abstract: theyresult from the act of distinguishing of an object’s parts. The division of an objectinto its parts (mental division) is necessary to build a concept of an object by a de-scription or by a definition. Concepts are discursive, which means that they consistof parts mentioned in description or in definition. Analytic concepts are produced byabstraction; they are derived from ideas of objects (the concepts concerning objectsof everyday life experience), and synthetic concepts are constructed in an arbitraryway from parts of analytic concepts (for example the golden mountain).

Metap

hysics

ofA

xiological

Realism

61

presentation

ideas (intuitive, concrete)

primitive: based on perception

simple complex

derivative

recollections: based on memory imaginations: based on creativity

concepts (symbolic, discursive & abstract)

analytic synthetic


It follows from this that a property of an object which does not be-long to the object’s description is impossible6. If Czeżowski is right atthis point (concerning the nature of property), then, axiological real-ism in the form defended by Moore (in Poland Tatarkiewicz held thesame view [Tatarkiewicz 1971, 269]) is impossible because all sentencescontaining axiological predicates would be false (since, as will be demon-strated below, there are no properties which would be denoted by thesepredicates). Therefore, it is extremely important for a Brentanist likeCzeżowski (sensitive to language analysis) to find metaphysics whichcould serve as a ground for axiological realism.

4 Non-predicative, propositional and tran-scendental concept of values

The arguments against the predicative conception of values are similar tothe reasons of non-predicative notion of existence therefore I will presentthem together.

The first reason is based in principle on Hume’s and Kant’s views.An existent object and a non-existent object do not differ in content,or as Meinong would say: they do not differ with regard to the nuclearproperties, the same may be said about values, and, hence, a judgmentabout existence and a judgment about values make no addition to thedescription of an object [Czeżowski 1938, 4]. Therefore, existence andvalues are not properties. The argument in this form seems to be validin spite of the fact that there is a difference in content between a presen-tation of an existent object and a presentation of a non-existent object(the point was observed by Jaquette [Jaquette 1986, 435]7.

6But someone may object here and insist that there is a clear difference between‘being presented’ by a conscious subject and ‘characterizing an object’, ‘making ad-dition to an object’ or to its description. It is still possible — one may argue — thatsomething characterizes an object but we are not able to percept or think of it in anyway because of the limited capacity of presentation. Then the question arises: howis it possible that a property (the corresponding predicate) makes no addition to theobject’s description (if it made any addition, one could present it) but it characterizesan object? Some Brentanists would rather say that if a property makes an additionto the object (to its description) and it is possible that someone presents it, then suchan entity characterizes an object, and conversely.

7Jaquette observes that “Thinking about the round square is undoubtedly differ-ent than thinking about the existent round square. But this does not mean thatthe existent round square is a different intentional object than the round square.Meinong following Twardowski, distinguishes between the act, content, and object ofpsychological presentations. The content of an assumption about the round square


The second reason is that since axiological sentences are true or false(as Czeżowski claimed), then they are, according to the Brentanianpsycho-ontology, expressions of axiological judgments. The nature ofjudgment is explained by Czeżowski in terms of the so called ‘idiogenetictheory of judgment’, which embraces two essential claims [Łukasiewicz2006, 188]:

(1) each judgment is reducible to the existential judgment; that is tothe judgment asserting the existence of an object

(2) no judgment is a combination of a subject and a predicate.

The axiological judgment does not satisfy (1) because it asserts the valueof an object (as will be demonstrated below), and not its existence, but itsatisfies (2): the axiological judgment as a judgment is not a combinationof a subject and a predicate. It follows from this that the judgment ‘ais good’ does not contain any predicate. The word ‘good’, according tothe idiogenetic theory of judgment, is only an apparent predicate (thesame may be said about the word ‘beautiful’ and their synonyms).

The third reason was delivered by the analysis of the syntactic struc-ture of expressions composed of such words as ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘necessary’and ‘beautiful’, and according to this analysis, existence and values arenot any properties because they are not symbolized in language by pred-icates. Such words as ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘necessary’ and ’beautiful’ are onlymorphologically similar to predicates but, in fact, they are not predi-cates. They are sentential functors because they occur in such construc-tions as, for example, ‘It is necessary that. . . ’, ‘It is good that. . . ’, ‘It isbeautiful that. . . ’, or ‘It is true that. . . ’. It is of course permissible tosay:

‘The blue sky is beautiful’

as it is possible to say:

‘The sky is blue’

But the sentence ‘The blue sky is beautiful’ is equivalent to the sen-tence:

‘It is beautiful that the sky is blue’.

or to the sentence

‘It is beautiful that for some x: (x is a sky) and (x is blue)’.

is different than the content of an assumption about the existent round square. Thelived-through psychological experience of each of these assumptions is phenomeno-logically distinct. But the intentional object of the assumptions may be identical.”[Jaquette 1986, 435].


However, it is not possible to interpret ‘The sky is blue’ in the sameway because the linguistic construction ‘It is blue that. . . ’ cannot resultin any sentence [Czeżowski 1965, 38]. More generally, we say that thesentence

‘a exists’

may be translated into the sentence:

‘It is true that for some x: x is a’

or into:

‘It is true that there is such an x that x is a’ 8.

5 Modi essendi

Let me now following Czeżowski introduce the concept of modi essendiwhich is crucial for his metaphysics.

Czeżowski says that:

In all these examples there occurs a sentence composed ofmodus and dictum (if we use the classical terminology);modus is the expression: ‘It is necessary that. . . ’, ‘It is truethat. . . ’ etc., dictum is the sentence following modus. Todaywe call modus a sentential functor. The circumstance thatmodal functors (necessary, possible), the functor of assertion(it is true that. . . ) and the functor of evaluation (good, beau-tiful) do require as their complement a sentence (and not aname, as other adjectives do when they play the role of anattribute) shows that these modi cannot be given in presen-tations but that they are asserted by propositions. Anyway,it has been well known for a long time — Hume and Kantwere conscious of it — that they (modi) cannot be given inany presentation, and even that these expressions are ’con-tentless’; they express only someone’s reaction to a certainstate of affairs. [Czeżowski 1965, 38-39, my translation]

According to these considerations, I think that the sentence: ‘a isvaluable’ means

‘It is valuable that a exists’.

And the last sentence means the same as the sentence8The word ‘is’ occurring in the expression ‘Some x is a’ denotes the relation of

membership if ‘a’ is a general term, or the relation of identity if ‘a’ is a singular term.


‘It is valuable that for some x: x is a’.

Thus, Czeżowski’s view is that such expressions as ‘exists’, ‘valuable’,‘good’, ’beautiful’ but also ‘necessary’ and ‘possible’ are not predicates(of the first level at least), and, therefore, they do not denote any proper-ties of things or individuals. However, sentences containing them are notnecessarily false because they assert that what was called in the MiddleAges ’ways of being’ (modi essendi) .

But it is not clear what modi essendi are. The above quotation saysthat modi essendi are represented by sentential functors but also thatthey are asserted by propositions. Therefore, we may ask: if they are notproperties what might they be? Are they correlates of sentences whichare built by means of relevant sentential functors — axiological functors— i.e., are they states of affairs or facts of a special kind or are theyonly correlates of sentential functors?

If they (modi essendi) are correlates of sentential functors, then theycannot be states of affairs because expressions representing states of af-fairs (sentences) can be transformed by such an operation as, for examplenominalization made by the word ‘that’, and sentential functors cannotbe transformed in that way. The result of the nominalization of the sen-tence ‘Peter is truthful’ is the expression ‘that Peter is truthful’ whichcan be the subject of a sentence, for example, ‘that Peter is truthfulis good’, but the result of the nominalization of the functor ‘it is truethat. . . ’ is the meaningless expression ‘that it is true that. . . ’, whichstill is in need of completion.

Therefore, let us assume that modi essendi including values are cor-relates of sentences, that is that values (and existence) are facts.

Then, however, complex sentences would presumably have their ownpropositional correlates. This would also concern the sentences:

‘It is true that Peter is truthful’

and

‘It is good that Peter is truthful’.

Let us represent the sentence ‘Peter is truthful’ as ‘p’. And now,one may argue that, if modi essendi are really states of affairs, then thecorrelates of sentences ‘It is good that p’, ‘It is good that it is goodthat p’ and ‘It is good that it is good that it is good that p’ and so onare states of affairs as well. Then, however, one may pose the question:what is the difference between two sentences ’It is good that p’ and ‘Itis good that it is good that p’? If there were no difference between thesentences in question, then it would mean that they do not have theirown correlates either because they have no correlates at all, and then


there are no values, or, because they have one and the same correlateand a candidate for such a correlate could be p9. But it would meanthat there are no values either since p is a natural fact and we excludedfrom the very beginning that axiological propositions can be inferredfrom natural propositions; that is from propositions related to naturalfacts.

I think that there are at least two possible answers to the abovequestion10.

(1) One can render the sentence ‘It is good that it is good that p’(this sentence also may be read as ‘It is good that p is good’)as a metalanguage sentence saying something about the first levelsentence ‘It is good that p’ (‘p is good’), but it is not clear what infact the second level sentence “It is good that ‘it is good that p’ ”says about the first level sentence ‘It is good that p’.

Let us note that in the case of ‘truth’ in the complex metalanguagesentence such as for example “It is true that ‘today is Friday’ istrue” the situation is a little bit different and more understandablethan in the case of ‘good’. The first occurrence of truth in thelast sentence would be objectual, and, according to the classicalconception of truth, would concern the existence of the state ofaffairs: Today is Friday, and the second occurrence of truth wouldrefer to the metalanguage concept of truth, and would concern thefirst level sentence. The case of truth, however, is insufficient formaking clear the point with regard to values (goodness): the sec-ond level sentence “It is good that ‘It is good that p’ ” would saythat the first level sentence ‘It is good that p’ is good. The sec-ond occurrence of ‘good’ in the considered metalanguage sentence

9I’m grateful to Manuel Rebuschi for his remark that if the expression ‘it is goodthat. . . ” were interpreted as a modal functor (see also note 10 and 15 below), thenthere would obtain the equivalence between Gp and GGp (Gp means ‘it is good thatp’); such a logical relation is valid in the modal systems S4 and S5. However, thesesystems do not admit the equivalence between both formulas and p, because it wouldbe a case of the collapse of modalities.

10I do not exclude, in principle, a third possible answer to the question discussed;modi essendi (axiological functors) could be interpreted as usual modal functors(@, ♦), that means not only as sentential functors, but as intensional functors. If weinterpret modi essendi in this way, we automatically get the irreducibility of axiolog-ical sentences to natural sentences because of intensionality of modal logic. However,Czeżowski himself, could not accept such an interpretation because of his reservationsto intensional logic. That reservation to intensional contexts was typical of the Lvov-Warsaw School. But, the interpretation of axiological functors in terms of intensionallogic might enable us to see the true originality of Czeżowski’s account of values andaxiological sentences.


would apply to the fact p.

Whatever the word ‘good’ may stand for, certainly the concept ofgood related to a sentence has no moral or, more generally, axi-ological sense, and that would concern not only the second levelconcept of good but also higher level concepts resulting from theprogressing iteration of the first level sentence (to be more precise:of the functor ‘it is good. . . ’).

(2) The metalanguage interpretation of the word ‘good’ occurring incomplex sentences is not the only possible one. There is a cleardifference between the sentence ‘Peter’s truthfulness is good’ andthe sentence ‘It is good that Peter’s truthfulness is good’. It seemsthat in the last case we do not say something about the sentencebut about the world which is such that Peter’s truthfulness is goodin it, perhaps, even we say that the world is good since it containsas its constituent a given good state of affairs.

Therefore, in my view, the very possibility of iteration of axiologicalpropositions (or facts) is not a sufficient reason to eliminate the proposi-tional interpretation of values regarded as states of affairs. I think thatthe above analysis shows also that it is at least possible that there is adifference between iterated axiological sentences of different levels, andhence it is at least possible that they have their own correlates11.

11Another possible reason why modi essendi can be regarded as states of affairsmay be the following one. Modi essendi are ways (perhaps one may say ’forms’) inwhich object’s properties are bound together. For example green can be related toother properties of an object in such a way that it will be evaluated as a beautiful one.Pleasure can be related to other properties (of an object’s behavior) in such a waythat the behavior will be evaluated as a good one [Wiśniewski 1992, 143]. The way inwhich objects are related one to another is sometimes called a ’state of affairs’. ButI think it is not a correct view. True, the way in which properties are related one toanother in a given object may be regarded as a state of affairs, but it is not identicalwith an object’s value, say, with its beauty because beauty is that what an aestheticsentence asserts about the way in which properties are related one to another. Forexample, the way properties are related one to another is asserted by the sentence‘White contrasts with black in Rembrandt’s painting’, but the beauty of the relationbetween the colors is asserted in the sentence ‘It is beautiful that white and black arein relation one to another in Rembrandt’s painting’ or in the sentence ‘The contrastbetween white and black colors in Rembrandt’s painting is beautiful’. If the relationbetween properties in a given object were identical with its value, then, arguably, thetwo sentences mentioned above, would not be different in meaning and the first onemight have been replaced by the second one. The result that modi essendi are not theways in which properties or objects are related one to another does not preclude thatmodi essendi are states of affairs; modi essendi can be higher axiological facts whichsupervenes on an inferior natural fact (a way properties are related one to another).


6 Transcendental concept of values

The conclusion that values are facts or can be regarded as facts could not,however, be accepted by Czeżowski because he very seriously treated hisstatement that the functor of the assertion ‘it is true that. . . ’ is a functorof existence, and that the functor of evaluation ‘it is valuable that. . . ’is the functor of value [Czeżowski 1965, 69]. This was the direct con-sequence of the definition of truth, according to which, a proposition istrue if there exists a referent of the subject that the proposition is about.Since existence and values are not properties and cannot be presented,then they cannot be states of affairs (facts) because the latter can bepresented. A state of affairs is just a complex object of a presentationupon which a relevant judgment is based, and it usually has the formaRb (where ‘R’ stands for a relation which in principle is thinkable: canbe defined in terms of the set theory) 12. Thus, the existence of a factand not the fact of existence is asserted by an assertoric proposition,and, similarly, the value of a fact and not the fact of value is asserted byan axiological proposition.

However, if values are not individuals, not properties (and not facts),and expressions representing them in language are contentless (mean-ingless), then, one may suppose that there are no values at all, and thataxiological antirealism is right13. To avoid such a conclusion and to de-fend realism Czeżowski resorts to transcendental concepts and regardsmodi essendi as transcendentalia. Transcendentalia do not belong to thedescription of an object, that is: they do not determine universals andcannot be defined, (in Brentanian terms: they cannot be presented) and,hence, they are no properties in Czeżowski’s psycho-ontology. However,one should add that they are not nothing. Since existence and values arenot properties either, then — Czeżowski might have concluded — theycan be regarded as transcendentalia [Czeżowski 1977, 2004]14 .

12Of course someone may postulate unthinkable facts lying beyond the capacityof presentation but it would make Czeżowski’s psycho-ontology incoherent (a factwhich does not make any addition to the description of objects involved in it cannotbe presented, and hence cannot be regarded as a fact).

13In Poland Ossowska stressed this point strongly: axiological propositions intendto assert something but they fail, and, therefore, they all are false [Ossowska 1966,124].

14Czeżowski followed, however, not Thomas Aquinas but Duns Scotus by claimingthat transcendentalia are disjunctive. But he denied also Duns Scotus theory whenhe was saying that existence and values are disjunctive because they can be negated;the negation of goodness is evil and the negation of beauty is ugliness. He suspendedalso the thesis that transcendental concepts, for example existence and goodnessare convertible. The question about convertibility of transcendental concepts may be


In sum, the essential role in the controversy between non-naturalisticrealism and antirealism is played by the claim that values (goodness,beauty) are not object’s properties (and not facts). Therefore, goodnessand beauty cannot be identical with any natural property or with anynatural fact. Truthfulness, kindness, sacrifice, justice, lie, faithfulness,harmony etc. are not values but they are natural properties, and, asCzeżowski calls them, they are ‘criteria of goodness’, ‘criteria of evil’,‘criteria of beauty’, or more generally, ‘criteria of values’ [Czeżowski1989, 107].

I think that the relation between sentence, value and state of affairsmight be as follows: a state of affairs is the correlate of a sentence andthe value (or existence) of a state of affairs is asserted by a complexsentence built by the sentential functor ‘it is valuable that. . . ’ (or ‘it istrue that. . . ’).

7 Some possible objections against Czeżowski’saxiological realism

Values can be regarded as modi essendi provided that it is possible todemonstrate that the sentence:

It is valuable that Σx(x = a) (*)

is a faithful translation of the sentence

a is valuable. (**)

A faithful translation is to be understood as a synonymous and, hence,a logically equivalent translation. If we read the particular quantifieroccurring in the sentence (*) in the existential way, then the sentence(*) will be false if ‘a’ stands for a fictional object, and, therefore, theproposed translation will not be faithful [Gorzka 1991, 21–22].

However, this objection can be removed, if we relate existence to amodel. We may say about each (non-contradictory) object that it existsin a certain model but, of course not always that the model will be thereal world15.

answered empirically by means of experience and not a priori by means of deduction.Jan Woleński gave the analysis of the relation between Duns Scotus and Czeżowski’sapproach to the problem of transcendental concepts [Woleński 2004].

15Such a move implies a change in the understanding of the Brentanist concept of


Next, someone may argue: it does not matter whether axiologicalexpressions are predicates or sentential functors because it is still possiblethat they only express mental attitudes or emotions, and they do notrefer to any reality. The response to this objection is that since axi-ological knowledge is possible (in the sense that its theoretical modelis not inconsistent, and Czeżowski provided such a model), then theclass of referents of axiological expressions, whatever they might be,is not necessarily empty, and that it is better for some reasons (thebest explanation of the existence of inferences in the domain of axiolog-ical discourse) to claim that axiological expressions have referents in thereality than to claim that they have no referents.

One may also say that axiological expressions regarded as sententialfunctors are only apparent sentential functors because in fact they arepredicates, and one should translate the sentence:

‘It is good that Peter is truthful’

into the sentence:

‘Peter’s truthfulness is good’.

The response from Czeżowski’s position would be that if ‘good’ werea predicate, then it could be defined in terms of natural predicates or

being (ens) and makes it more similar to the Tomist concept of ens, according towhich, an object or being is that what exists (and not only that what is given in a(re) presentation). An object which exists in the real world will not exist in a world offiction, and conversely, but since it exists somewhere and somehow, it is a being. Therelativisation of existence to a model allows to preserve the validity of the principle ofexistential generalization obtaining in the first level predicate logic (Pa →

PxPx)

in intentional discourse as well. The last fact is an additional argument for makingsuch a step. Czeżowski himself made such a move in his later works [Łukasiewicz2004]. The negation of existence in the sentence ‘a does not exist’ would amount tothe exclusion of an object from the domain of a model. However, it is also worthnoting that if axiological functors were interpreted as usual modal operators (Note9), then it would be possible to claim that

Σx (it is valuable that (x = a)) (***)

is the faithful translation of (*). One could then choose between a dicto and a de re

interpretation of (*). Moreover, if modi essendi were interpreted as modalities, thena standard ‘objectual’ interpretation of the quanifier

Px would not imply that ‘a’

refers in the actual world. If one would consider ‘it is valuable that. . . ’ as a modaloperator, let us say [ν], one could use Kripke’s possible worlds semantics to accountfor it: [ν]ϕ is true at a world w, iff ϕ is true in every world w’ reachable from w.One need not postulate that if [ν]ϕ is true in the actual world, then ϕ is true in theactual world: some valuable facts might be non actual (like: soldiers stopping wars).It means that the actual world is not reachable from itself along the ‘[ν]-lines’. Then,one could consider valuable worlds with other beings than the actual ones (fictionalbeings included).


properties. But it is not the case, and hence the word ‘good’ is anapparent predicate.

The next problem is that Czeżowski regards for example justice,truthfulness or faithfulness as natural properties, and by doing it he isnot able to recognize axiological (normative) character of these expres-sions. He himself would have responded, I suppose, that these naturalproperties retain axiological nature because they may be criteria of val-ues.

Axiological realism is based on some assumptions concerning thestructure of language; language is understood as containing expressionsbelonging to different syntactic categories: namely to predicates and sen-tential functors. However, such an assumption is not true for all naturallanguages, and therefore, at most, we may speak about realism in rela-tion to a certain type of language. I think that the objection is right.The only possible form of axiological realism, if we may call it in thatway, is ‘internal axiological realism’.

8 Conclusions

Czeżowski’s conceptions of values reconstructed above can be consideredboth from historical and systematic points of view. From the historicalpoint of view, Czeżowski’s proposal is above all a development of Twar-dowski’s ideas. Twardowski was a metaphysical and axiological realist,but he virulently defended Brentano’s idiogenetic theory of judgmentand treated values as the object’s properties. However, it seems that theacceptance of the following three propositions:

(1) Axiological sentences are true or false;

(2) Judgment is not a combination of a subject and a predicate;

(3) Values are properties

is logically impossible. The acceptance of (1) and (2) entails the rejectionof (3), and Czeżowski accepted propositions (1) and (2) but replaced(3) by its negation: Values are not properties. Thus, his revision ofTwardowski’s views makes them coherent and at least logically tenable.

It is interesting from the systematic point of view to which extentCzeżowski’s proposal meets one of the most vividly discussed issues inthe filed of contemporary metaphysics of axiology, that is the problem ofsupervenience. According to Czeżowski, values and the object’s natural


properties are ontologically distinct because modi essendi are regarded astranscendentalia, and, hence not as properties16. However, at the sametime values depend on the object’s natural properties; it is not possi-ble that the natural properties do not change if the values do change.In other words, values (in Czeżowski’s case modi essendi) supervene onproperties. The problem is that a non-naturalist is not able to explainthis fact: the fact of an ontological dependence of values upon naturalproperties and the fact of an ontological difference between values andproperties. A naturalist can explain supervenience by the assumptionthat values are reducible to natural (non-axiological) properties. Thiskind of explanation is not accessible to Czeżowski since values and prop-erties belong to different ontological categories. Czeżowski never consid-ered the problem of supervinience, and, hence, we may only speculatewhat he would have responded to the problem in question. He couldhave argued that the naturalist’s reasoning must be unsound because itproves too much. It is so becasue the form of the argument seems togeneralize into an argument that no class of entities can supervene onanother class of entities unless the former are reducible to the latter insome way. But this cannot be a correct view in all cases of supervie-nience. According to the idiogenetic theory of judgment, a judgmentsupervenes on a presentation but a judgment cannot be reduced to anypresentation, and the same have to be said about values and properties.Irrespective of whether such an approach to the problem of superve-nienice is satisfactory, Czeżowski’s solution based on the medieval meta-physics and the Brentanian psycho-ontology provides a bold enrichmentof the metaphysics of axiology, and constitutes an original achievementof Brentano’s school and in particular of the Polish Brentanism.

References

Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz

2004 Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos, Dordrecht: Kluwer AcademicPublishers.

16Since Czeżowski holds that values are not properties and axiological predicatesare only apparent predicates, which do not refer (as predicates) to anything in thereality, his positions is similar to the error theory with regard to the non-predicativenature of values. Of course, Czeżowski’s views differ significantly from the errortheory because in his opinion axiological propositions are not always false; they canbe sometimes true, and their truth-makers are axiological modi essendi.


Czeżowski, Tadeusz

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1948 O metafizyce, jej kierunkach i zagadnieniach, 1st ed., Toruń:Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, T. Szczesny.

1959 Główne zasady nauk filozoficznych, 3rd ed., Wroclaw: ZakladNarodowy im. Ossolińskich.

1965 Filozofia na rozdrozu, Warszawa: PWN.

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1989 Pisma z etyki i teorii wartości, Wrocław/Warszawa: Osso-lineum.

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1986 Meinong’s doctrine of the modal moment, in Non-Existence andPredication, Haller Rudolf (ed.), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 423–438.

Lenman, James

2004 Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism,in http:/plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/.

Łukasiewicz, Dariusz

2004 Tadeusz Czeżowski’s Approach to the Intentionality and On-tology of Fiction, Reports on Philosophy, 22, 142–161.

2006 Tadeusz Czeżowski on Existence, in A. Chrudzimski and D.Łukasiewicz (eds.) Brentano and Polish Philosophy, ontos verlag/Frankfurt/Lancaster, 183–215.

Ossowska, Maria

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74

Wiśniewski, Ryszard

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Woleński, Jan

1989 Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School, Dordrecht,Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

2004 Malum, Transcendentalia and Logic, in Arkadiusz Chrudzim-ski, Wolfgang Huemer (eds.) Phenomenology and Analysis, Frank-furt/Lancaster: ontos Verlag, 359–370.

Part II

Modal (Anti-)Realism

Which Variety of Realism?Some Asseverations on the Dependence of

Abstracta upon Concreta

Frédéric Nef

EHESSInstitut Jean-Nicod (CNRS-EHESS-ENS)

Résumé : La critique du nihilisme par Lowe est soumise à une évaluation. Lenihilisme semble impliquer un engagement à l’existence d’entités abstraites etLowe utilise le principe de dépendance (PD) — les abstraits dépendent desconcrets — pour bloquer la référence à des entités abstraites : les nombres sontdits dépendre de concrets. On défendra l’idée que cette forme de fictionnalismen’est pas innocente et que nous devons sérieusement envisager l’alternative queconstitue le platonisme. On défendra une forme de platonisme, le platonismeparticularisé. En conclusion on proposera de renoncer au PD.

Abstract: Lowe’s criticism of nihilism is discussed. Nihilism seems to involvea commitment to abstract entities and Lowe used recently the DependencePrinciple (DP ) — abstracta depend upon concreta — in order to block refer-ence to abstract entities: numbers are said to depend upon concreta. It willbe argued that this form of arithmetical fictionalism is not harmless and thatwe have to evaluate the respective coast of the Platonist alternative. I willdefend a form a particularized Platonism. In conclusion it will appear that wecan give up the DP .

Introduction

Could there be a different world from ours? Could there be a realitywith a radically different structure, e.g., without events? Could there beonly abstract things, like numbers? Could there be absolutely nothing?These questions belong to metaphysics, the core of philosophy; theysystematically relate to each other. To be a realist, or an antirealist,and to belong to one sort or another inside one of these two persuasions


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asks one to respond to these questions. Realism does not imply a strongbelief in the necessity of our world, as it is, nor a strong disbelief in theexistence of an ontological structure of the world, which we can at leastpartly apprehend though perception, language and science.

What is called metaphysical or ontological nihilism1 is always op-posed to realism. I want nonetheless to defend the view that there existsa harmless form of nihilism compatible with realism, because in factwhat is bad in nihilism is a strong form of fictionalism asserting thateverything is fictional, viz. all truthmakers are mere fictions and thattherefore everything said or written is in fact pretended, false. J. Lowethought that even a moderate form of nihilism (what I call “harmless ni-hilism”) is a threat to realism and proposes again and again an argumentagainst it, based on an ontological Principle of Dependence, saying thatthere is no abstractum which does not depend upon a concretum.

I will argue that this principle has in fact hidden fictionalist con-sequences. Usually metaphysicians defending this principle say that togive it up is to endorse Platonism. I will explore the consequences ofthis annulment of the principle and I will argue that Platonism is muchless detrimental than fictionalism concerning mathematical objects, andtherefore that it is reasonable to give up the Dependence Principle (DP ).In that case one objection could be that endorsing even a moderate formof Platonism (that there are genuine abstract objects) implies accept-ing too strong a case for universalism. I will give reasons rather thansketching out an argument in order to show that the very idea sayingthat reality is fundamentally particular is compatible with the form ofPlatonism I am ready to endorse.

My final proposal will be then both to particularize Platonism andto relax possibilism. In many respects I will stand clear off immanentrealism, and probably one of the reasons is the weight I give to the on-tology of abstract objects, with, at the first rank, mathematical objectsand structures. An important reason, among several others, being thatin the interplay between singularity and regularity, I am more baffledby the first and therefore, ready to make some concessions to univer-salism in order to explain the deep ontological singularity of everythingconstitutive of our world.

The main question in the modal realism debate is about possibleworlds: are they concrete, abstract or empty? Modal realists call themconcrete, ersatzists call them abstract and fictionalists call them empty.

1I shall use only that sense of ‘nihilism’ and never the other sense, forged byNietzsche and Dostoievski.

Which Variety of Realism? 79

I will not discuss how fictionalism entails nihilism. I assume this en-tailment, without explaining it. I propose to give an argument againstnihilism and to show that this argument is also in favor of realism. Be-fore giving this argument, I have to recall what sense is given to theconcept of nihilism. I will propose a distinction between two types ofnihilism.

Nihilism affirms that there are no concreta. We currently distinguishthree types of entities: concreta, abstracta, ficta. They are defined inthe following manner:

1) x is a concretum iff x is spatiotemporal and x is endowed with acausal potential.

2) x is an abstractum iff x is non spatiotemporal and is deprived ofcausal potential

3) x is a fictum iff x is neither a concretum, nor an abstractum

This categorization is not indexical, whereas the distinction between pos-sible and actual is indexical. Therefore the distinction between possibiliaand realia is also indexical. Abstracta are neither possibilia, nor realia.Metaphysical nihilism is therefore defined as:

The set of possible worlds could have contained only abstract ob-jects. There could have been only abstracta, sets and mathematicalstructures.

Ontological nihilism is defined as:

There could have been absolutely nothing, there could have beenno possible world.

In [Lihoreau & Nef 2007] we have discussed ontological nihilism and wehave given an argument against it, saying that it is necessary that thereis something, that it is impossible that there is nothing. This argumentis founded on the impossibility of an empty world. I will reformulatethis argument:

a) the property of self-identity must exist in every possible world.

b) if there is an empty world, its elements must be self-identical (by a)

c) an empty world is an empty set

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d) an empty set is composed of an element non identical to itself, z (byb,c) i.e. ∅ = {z 6= z}

e) There is no empty possible world (in virtue of b and d)

Statement (c) is based on a principle: if a is an expression like “e isa set of F ”, then e is a set. For example a set of chairs is a set. Itis somewhat similar to the distinction between pure and impure sets,between “sets” and “sets of F ”. It is only somewhat similar, because apure set is also a set of F , but considered as a set, not as an extensionof the set. This distinction is important, because metaphysical nihilismis in fact the negation of the existence of impure sets. Statement (e)cries out for clarification of what is an empty set. As there is no elementnon-identical to itself, the empty set does not contain any element.

This argument is problematical in many regards. It is not clear ac-cepting statement (d) as equivalent to the definition “an empty set is aset containing no element”. What is not clear is deciding that the emptyset disobeys the self-identity principle. This relative obscurity has ledJ. Lowe to introduce a Dependence Argument applied to abstracta andconcreta. Lowe says that if there are abstracta, there are concreta: allabstracta are founded at least ultimately on concreta. This argumenthas been discussed by Rodriguez Pereyra and defended by its author(cf. Lowe 1998, 2005). This argument is connected to our argument:the empty set is as a pure set, an abstractum, but it must be a set ofsomething. Therefore, there cannot be an empty set. Lowe reduces infact the empty set to a fiction, when he says that the empty set does notexist. His dependence argument is reinforced by a foundation principle:according to him, a set must be founded — there cannot be ad infinitumset of sets, ad infinitum hierarchy of sets. There must be a foundationstopping the dependence process. In the same way universals have to befounded on particulars instantiating them.

Ontological dependence of abstracta relative to concreta is impliedby a principle of instantiation of universals: if there were not instanti-ated universals, there would exist abstracta, viz. universals, which donot depend on concreta, viz. particulars. The line of argument is thefollowing: if the Platonism of universals were true, then the principleof necessary instantiation of universals, would be not valid and if thisprinciple were not valid, then there would be no necessary dependenceof abstracta on concreta.

The eventual admission of abstract objects is here perhaps the mostimportant ontological decision. The choice between immanent realism


and Platonism is derivative in relation to this eventual admission. Tobe or not to be a realist, to be a realist of such or such obedience de-pends on the conception we have of abstract objects. Abstract objectsare of several types: numbers, and more generally mathematical objects,properties, propositions. For the moment we can leave aside numbers.Realists consider properties as abstract objects. Properties are of twotypes: universals (or general properties) and tropes (or individual prop-erties). We know that tropes are abstract particulars. Particularismpossesses the advantage compared to immanent realism of avoiding theopaque and abstruse mechanism of instantiating abstract objects intoconcrete ones. A particularist considers a concretum as a collection ofabstracta, which is much easier to grasp, even if it is perhaps more dif-ficult to assent.

Two questions now: Is ontological particularism compatible with Pla-tonism? Does ontological particularism imply a form of fictionalism? Iwill defend the view that particularism and Platonism are compatibleand that particularism implies an harmless form of weak fictionalism,without undermining authentic realism. If I succeed in showing that itis true, I will be successful in demonstrating that metaphysical nihilismis not a serious threat against realism.

1 The Elements of the Problem

In a recent paper, “Against metaphysical Nihilism — Again”, JonathanLowe upholds immanentist realism against metaphysical nihilism. He ar-gues for the universality and necessity of the dependence principle (DP )saying that abstract objects depend upon concrete ones. He considersthe case of numbers as paradigmatic abstract objects and affirms theyobey to DP . This leads him to the conclusion in that zero and the emptyset are fictions, which in turn implies that numbers do not exist in thetrue sense of “exist”.

I do not want to discuss the relevance and the weight of the conces-sions we are ready to endorse towards fictionalism. This would lead usprobably to wonder if fictionalism, like realism, is modular or not. But,anyway, I see in that concession towards fictionalism something thatconcerns the very reality of numbers, an important piece in the ontologyof quantities. According to Frege and Lowe, numbers are properties ofconcepts. Lowe declares himself a Fregean, for he considers numbers asformal properties, like identity and existence. Zero is a property of theconcept “non identical to itself”. Nothing is non identical to itself and

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therefore the extension of this concept is empty. The empty set is theset that contains zero members. Zero plays an important role in theconstruction of numbers, as the empty set in set theory. For every setE, E = (E, ∅). To consider that zero and the empty set are fictionscould bring back towards a conception of numbers as concrete proper-ties of collections — “3” is then the property of the concrete collectionof three flowers I have picked. In that conception an empty set is not aset, because to be a set is to join under a concept a plurality of things. Iwill not discuss the problems linked to a fictionalist account of numbersand sets. I observe only that this concession towards fictionalism letsme doubt about DP ’s universality and wonder if it is not possible to dowithout it.

To keep DP has obviously an epistemic cost: more or less to giveup Fregean conception of numbers. To give up DP ’s universality has a,ontological cost: to admit in our ontology non-instantiated universals.However, from an epistemic point of view, Platonist realism towardsnumbers is not deprived of several advantages over immanent realism,as soon as we disregard natural numbers and turn our attention towardsrational and real ones.

In order to argue for a non-universal application of DP , I shall have todetermine consequences of this qualification. Among the consequencesfigures the possibility to be led to accept a world with only abstractobjects, what is commonly dubbed “metaphysical nihilism”. I shall re-tain the traditional distinction between ontological and metaphysical ni-hilism, the first one asserting that it is possible that there is nothing, orthat there could have been nothing. I shall make an additional distinc-tion between weak and strong version of fictionalism and two main formsof nihilism, in order to be very accurate about the relation connectingfictionalism and nihilism. Radical fictionalism says that everything isfalse, that therefore there is nothing, and as it is obviously a danger forrealism, I will have to decide if Platonism does or does not lead to thisextreme form of fictionalism. We may see some strong analogy betweenthe aforementioned discussion concerning numbers and the particularlyheated debate between realism and fictionalism in the metaphysics ofmodalities. What are possible worlds? Are they either abstract or con-crete? Do empty possible worlds exist? We call usually modal realistspeople saying that possible worlds are concrete and ersatzist or nihilistthose extensionalist philosophers who proclaim that they are in fact ab-stract. Fictionalists would say they are neither abstract nor concrete.

A brief remark about the opposition between fictionalism and modalrealism: The modal realist interprets typically a sentence like “it is pos-


sible that p” in the following manner: “in w, p” where w in the operator“in w” represents a possible world and “in w” as a whole is an existentialquantifier on worlds. Fictionalists interpret this very same utterance, “inw, p”, in a different manner: w is an expression of fiction, such that “inw, p” means “according to the fiction w, p”. p is a belief, or a sentence,not a proposition, because a proposition is an abstract object — it isa concrete object, either psychological or linguistic. According to themodal realist this utterance means: “there is at least a possible world,w, which is concrete and existent, in which it is true that p”, where w

is a world variable, whereas the fictionalist considers “in w” as an oper-ator moving the truth conditions of p, w having no special sense outsidethe expression “in w”, which is an abbreviation for “in a fiction called aworld w”. Moreover, if fictionalism does not imply nihilism, it is com-pletely contradictory with modal realism, which denies the possibility ofan empty possible world, in so far as David Lewis conceives of possibleworlds as mereological sums.

J. Lowe’s Argument Against Nihilism : the Depen-

dence Principle

J. Lowe’s argument of dependence stipulates that if there are abstracta,there are concreta too, because abstracta depend upon concreta. Thisargument has some connection with the one we have discussed. Theempty set is an abstract entity as far it is a set, but it must be a set ofsomething, and in that case F = 0. Therefore there cannot be an emptyset — Lowe complains that the empty set is a ‘reified fiction’. Lowe’sargument implies then both to use DP and to reject the existence ofempty set, reduced to a fictional status. The DP is reinforced by aprinciple of foundation. A set must be founded and there cannot be adinfinitum a set of sets; at a certain point there must be a foundation ofthe elements. This implies that a universal must be ultimately foundedupon particulars which are instantiating it.

DP as we have seen implies a principle of necessary instantiation ofuniversals: if there are non-instantiated universals, there could be ab-stracta, namely universals that would not depend upon concreta, namelyoccurring particulars. Lowe’s argument is then the following: if Platon-ism of universals is true, then the principle of necessary instantiationof universals is not valid any more and if this principle is not valid,then there is not any more a necessary dependence of abstracta uponconcreta because universals are abstract. If there is not this necessarydependence, then it could be possible that there are only abstract ob-

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jects. In short, according Lowe, Platonism does imply the possibility ofmetaphysical nihilism. However the inverse is obviously not true andtherefore Platonism is not equivalent to metaphysical nihilism.

Abstract Objects

There are several sorts of abstract objects: numbers, more generallymathematical objects and structures, properties (if any), propositions.Lowe is obliged to assert that numbers do not exist. The Fregean concep-tion of numbers as abstract objects, that is to say types of properties,seems to be a rigorous point of departure. Lowe’s position combinestherefore an arithmetical fictionalism and an immanent realism of prop-erties. He rejects the existence of zero and of the empty set; he con-siders numbers are different from concrete objects and affirms they donot exist strictly speaking, for he defines them as formal concepts, notas objects. According to Lowe arithmetical truths are therefore truthswithout truthmakers. Realists usually consider properties and monadicor non-monadic relations are abstract objects. In general anti-realists re-duce them to predicates (for difficulties of this reduction, cf. [Nef 2006]).Properties are of two sorts: universals, or general properties and indi-vidual properties, possibly tropes or abstract particulars. This phrase,“abstract particular”, is in fact ambiguous. “A is abstract relatively toB” means: “A is separated from B by a mental act and A is foundedupon B”. For example a blue sheet of paper exhibits this particular coloras an accident and depending moment. It is an aspect of the sheet ofpaper abstracted, separated by the mind, but that in fact depends uponthings and therefore cannot exist without it.

Particularism

Particularism is in some respect superior to immanent realism, in so faras it does not consider ontological particularity as the product of an in-stantiation process. This instantiation of abstract universals in concreteparticulars, conceived of as ontologically grounded, is mysterious. Theresemblance relation, even if it is also primitive is less mysterious thanthe one of instantiation. From a particularist point of view a concreteobject is a collection of abstract objects. From a realist point of view, Iadopt here, the resemblance relation is founded upon a resemblance ofessences relative to collections of concrete objects.


Our Argument in Favor of Particularized Platonism

The argument is an argument of compatibility and in that sense it isnot a very strong one. It says that it is not contradictory to admit non-instantiated universals and abstract particulars if we wish to confuteonly ontological nihilism and if we are neutral towards metaphysicalnihilism. It says only that there is nothing concrete, but if we have non-instantiated universals and abstract particulars, there is nothing concreteand then the aforementioned compatibility is proved. ParticularizedPlatonism does not imply radical fictionalism. In that case the universeis composed with abstract objects, either non-instantiated universals orabstract particulars. It is non-contradictory to admit non-instantiateduniversals and abstract particulars, which do no depend upon concreta.

The conclusion may seem paradoxical, because Platonism in generalimplies that there could have been no particular and not only no con-crete thing. “Particularized Platonism” as we could call it, is a Platonismreduced to the possibility that there is no spatiotemporal abstractum,but stipulating at the same time that there are indeed abstract particu-lars. This Platonism is therefore compatible with the weak metaphysicalnihilism.

Here two problems claim our attention. In the first place is this on-tological particularism really compatible with Platonism, or this choiceof a particularist option independent with the choice between immanentrealism and Platonism? In the second place does ontological particular-ism imply a form of fictionalism or contingentism in the sense we havedefined concerning the different types of nihilism? I shall support theview that Platonism and particularism are in fact compatible and thatparticularism implies indeed weak fictionalism. This view, I shall main-tain is in no way contradictory with genuine realism. If I would be ableto give some convincing reasons to think in that way, I would succeed toshow that moderate metaphysical nihilism is not a threat for the realism.

2 Compatibility Relations between Ontolo-gies

Let us outline our ontological background. I shall contemplate the com-patibility relations between these four ontologies, immanent realism,modal realism, particularized Platonism and nihilism. Modal realismaffirms there are concrete possible worlds, particularized Platonism that

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there are non-instantiated abstract universals and abstract particulars,nihilism that there could be only abstract objects.

There are first-order abstract objects; i.e., abstract particulars andconcrete objects are composed with abstract particulars. There are alsosecond-order abstract objects, i.e. resemblance classes of first-order par-ticulars. The Aristotelian intuition of the basic character of particularsis thereby confirmed. But these abstract particulars may not constituteconcrete objects and in that case the second-order abstract objects donot depend upon concrete objects. We have here to stress that the def-inition of the term “abstract” used for example in the phrase “abstractparticular” is not equivalent to the one given by immanent realism, whichidentifies something abstract with something abstracted from a concreteparticular by an intellectual operation of separation. For example themass “m” of a body “c” is an abstract particular according to an imma-nentist realist, because m is separated from c by the mind. An immanentrealist does not accept the radical particularist thesis that affirms thatm is an ultimate ontological constituent of c. In that case the act ofseparation itself is founded upon the very ontological structure of con-crete particular. In that respect is the Platonist point of view close tothe particularist stance; it does not accept abstract objects which arenot necessarily separated aspects of reality by an empirical process ofabstraction, it has a conception of abstracts hospitable to abstract par-ticulars, even if Platonism in general admits only universal abstracta.

Objections Against Immanent Realism

This accounts for the non-actualized dispositional properties. Theseproperties can be actualized in a world different of the actual world.In that case second-order objects relative to these properties do exist,but do not depend upon anything in our world. For example it could bepossible that no man is good — in the case of a general corruption ofmoral intuition —, but however this dispositional property of goodnesscould be actualized in a possible world in which conditions are not sim-ilar — if the corruption of moral intuition has not taken place, or is notuniversal. In that case therefore the Platonist intuition that there existsa non-instantiated abstract universal is correct. It is also correct if theredoes exist a world where there exists only even collections of concrete ob-jects. Let us figure out a Borges’ world in which reigns the superstitionof oddness and in which are annihilated all individuals whose presencein a collection means that this collection becomes even. In that worldin which exist only even collections of concrete objects — let us call


that world an even world — the odd numbers are not depending uponconcrete objects, or classes of concrete objects, but still do exist at leastas sums of even numbers (for example 7 + 3 = 10). It would be stillworse if a world would not contain collections of objects whose cardinalis identical to prime numbers, as we know the important role of them inthe theory of numbers. Our line of argument is then the following: lawsof arithmetic are necessary and therefore it is contingent that concreteobjects do or do not instantiate such or such sort of property and thenDP is susceptible of being breached, there can be worlds only filled withabstract objects.

In a world in which all collections are even ones it is possible thatthere is an odd number of even collections. There is another range ofperhaps more convincing counter-examples to DP : irrational numbers,like π, imaginary numbers like

√−1, transfinite numbers as ℵ0. . . Upon

what depends√−1, π or ℵ0? Upon what depends -1 or 1/3? This kind

of argument goes the opposite way. Large cardinals cannot depend uponconcrete objects or collections of concrete objects: upon which collectionwould depend the number ℵ0, the smallest cardinal? To consider num-bers as fictions is coherent, even more than to consider them as abstractobjects depending upon concrete objects. But this respectable opinionis nonetheless an important concession towards fictionalism. Numbersand sets possess strong connections and to fictionalize numbers wouldprobably entail a fictionalization of sets. Would it be possible then toassert the existence of depending universals non-equivalent to sets? Ormore precisely: if sets are extensions of universals (for example the setof green things is the extension of the universal “green”) is it not disturb-ing to think that these extensions are fictions? Extensions of universalsare sets; would it be possible to preserve then universals from radicalfictionalization?

In Defense of Platonism

The Platonist alternative seems then to be more enticing. The objectionwe often addressed to Platonism not to feel concerned by analysis of on-tological structure of particulars (artifacts, organisms and even persons)is destroyed if we are able to show that DP is not necessary and anywaycompatible with particularism, if we want to retain it. The question nowbecomes: how to conciliate these two affirmations, first that there existsabstract universal objects and second that concrete objects are composedof particular abstract objects? This difficulty is as considerable as theone linked to immanent realism, difficulty we have described a moment

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ago, but it possesses an advantage over immanent realism: to surrenderwhat is possible to cede and not to give up what is reasonable not tocede. We accept there could have been only abstract objects and in thesame time we maintain there could not have been absolutely nothing.The particularized Platonism is incompatible with ontological nihilism,if we give up the necessarily universal existential dependence of the ab-stract upon the concrete. However, since ontological nihilism — and notmetaphysical nihilism — is a threat towards realism, in attributing towhat there is an absolute contingency, it is not completely unthinkableto make the choice of a reformed Platonism.

About Modal Realism

According to Lewis modal realism is the doctrine saying that there canexist concrete possible worlds. We distinguish commonly genuine modalrealism from actualism. Modal realism says that there are concrete possi-ble worlds whereas actualism considers only abstract possible worlds, forexample sets of propositions, concepts. . . (Cf. [Divers 2002, 229]). Thiscautious formulation of modal realism aims to not exclude a possibilitythat possible worlds would be composed of abstract objects. Accordingto the definition of metaphysical nihilism given above, modal realism isnot a metaphysical nihilism, for the latter says that all possible worldsare composed with abstracta, even our actual world. In order to trans-form stricto sensu Lewisian modal realism into a metaphysical nihilism,we should have to extend in all worlds an eventual composition withabstracta alone.

Modal realism seems then at first sight compatible with Platonism,in so far as it does not a priori exclude that abstracta do depend uponconcreta. D. Lewis moreover seems to admit that tropes are genuine ab-stracta, on the same footing as universals and equivalence classes thereof.We have defined abstracta as non-spatiotemporal, but the tropes appearat first sight at least to be spatiotemporal. Apparently the mass ofa body has spatiotemporal coordinates. Socrates’ wisdom is not spa-tiotemporal, it is in virtue of its moral character, not in virtue of itsparticularity. Is it however certain that the man of a body possess spa-tiotemporal coordinates? A body fills a piece of space-time and this isbecause it fills this piece of space-time that he possesses its mass. It isnot only for this reason, but also for that reason, in virtue of the rela-tions between the mass and the geometry of space-time. But mass assuch is not spatiotemporal: in its definition we have no spatiotemporalcoordinates, even if these coordinates of the body play a role in its de-termination. The volume of a gas is a function of its pressure, but it


does not mean that the pressure has a volume. It seems more difficultto sustain that kind of argument concerning an event trope like MarilynMonroe’s smile. However on further consideration shows that spatiotem-poral determination is not self-evident. Which region, or which field doesthis smile fill? From when to when is this smile occurring? A smile is notcomparable to the trajectory of a solid along an axis, or the dilatationof a metal, caused by heath. It is a singular and complex event, whichis not assignable to a face in a certain occasion, but the mass did notinherit its spatiotemporal characters from the weighty body, even with-out, having by it spatiotemporal coordinates. The smile inherits also itscoordinates through the face it is depending upon.

Towards a Compatibilist Ontology: Particularized Pla-

tonism and Modal Realism

The combination of Platonism and particularism that I recommend, forreasons given above, is perhaps not adverse to modal realism. Modalrealism entails distinct affirmations: there are spatiotemporally discon-nected worlds (otherwise we would have only a Big World), each possibleworld is actual relatively to itself. In order to give a qualified answer tothis question, it is useful to recall D. Lewis’ views about concreta andabstracta.

Modal realism puts on the same footing our world and possibleworlds. D. Lewis affirms possible worlds are concrete like ours, thatis to say composed with concreta. However, the possible worlds do nothave necessarily the same ontological structure as ours. We may figureout abstract possible worlds in which there were only no conglomerate oftropes and therefore no concrete particulars. As the ontology of abstractparticulars is not a fancy, it is conceivable and therefore possible to ad-mit abstract worlds. If orphaned tropes belong to the equivalence classesof properties, these classes themselves would be abstract ones and thisworld composed only with abstracta would be an abstract world. Thereis then apparently a difficulty to characterize Lewisian possible worldsas concreta, to consider concreteness as an intrinsic property of possibleworlds. It is true that a Lewisian possible world may be a concretum,but it is not necessary and the difference between actualists and modalrealists cannot be identified with the difference between concrete andabstract possible worlds.

The ontology of modal realism and the particularized Platonism donot then conflict. The problematical distinction between abstractnessand concreteness is not a cause of conflict. It is possible that abstract

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possible worlds exist according to modal realists, as to Platonists. Itseems that modal realism is not strongly committed towards ontolog-ical DP . The basic ontology of modal realism — tropes, properties,and universals — is compatible with Platonism. D. Lewis would appar-ently prefer to shun non-instantiated universals, but he has apparentlyno decisive argument against their existence. Like Platonists, he con-siders properties are abstract beings. The truthful objection against thebringing together of modal realism and particularized Platonism doesnot result from an incompatibility of the two doctrines. It results fromthe neutrality of modal realism towards fictionalism, a doctrine deeplyopposed to Platonism, either particularist or not. We are faced to twoforms of fictionalism. The first form is the moderate one. Accordingto this version concreta are in fact abstracta and then appear to be fic-tions, for concreteness is purely fictional. The second form is the radicalone. According to this version it is not necessary that there is some-thing; perhaps there is absolutely nothing. Being or beingness is purelyfictional. Modal realism is incompatible with strong fictionalism: it isnecessary that there are worlds for there is something in our world andcounterpart relations bring about something in other worlds, without tosay anything about aliens. But modal realism is compatible with weakfictionalism: in a certain way we may affirm concreta are made withabstracta, if properties are indeed abstract and if the worlds are sets orcollections of properties.

Conclusion

It seems to me that immanentist realism has nothing to gain in thedefense of DP at any cost. If for a similar epistemic cost we wouldhave a choice between immanent realism and Platonism, it would belegitimate to choose the first, because the ontological cost is lower.

There is something offensive in fictionalism towards numbers: our in-tellectual intuition, both epistemic and metaphysical, is choked and it isnot surprising that radical nominalists generally sustain this fictionalism,as long as they are coherent.

We may conclude there is not from one side a metaphysical re-spectability consisting to postulate or presuppose the existence of con-crete particulars, on the basis of which mind would by separation pro-cesses create abstracta and from another side an ontological extrava-ganza, admitting beings as contradictory as abstract particulars, non-instantiated universals or existing possibilia.


References

Baldwin, T.

1996 There might be nothing, Analysis, 56.4, 231–238.

Coggins, G.

2003 World and Object: Metaphysical Nihilism and Three Accountsof Worlds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, 353–60.

Divers, J.

2002 Possible Worlds, Londres: Routledge Kegan.

Lewis, D.

1986 The Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lowe, E. J.

1998 The Possibility of Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2005 Against metaphysical nihilism — again (Modality Workshop,University of St Andrews, 2–3 December 2005).

Nef, F.

2006 Les propriétés des choses, Paris : Vrin.

Nef, F. & Lihoreau, F.

2007 Il n’ y a pas de monde vide, in Wolff, F. (éd.) Pourquoi y a-t-ilquelque chose plutôt que rien ?, Paris : PUF, 157–186.

Pasau, A.

2002 Why the subtraction argument does not add up, Analysis, 62(1), 73–75.

Rodriguez-Pereyra, G.

1997 There might be nothing: the subtraction argument improved,Analysis, 57 (3), 159–166.

2000 Lowe’s argument against nihilism, Analysis, 60 (4), 335–340.

2002 Metaphysical nihilism defended: reply to Lowe and Pasau,Analysis, 62 (2), 172–180.

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Blackburn’s Rejection of Modals

Scott ShalkowskiUniversity of Leeds

Résumé : Dans cet article je présente le dilemme de Simon Blackburn pourles théories vériconditionnelles de la modalité, et je discute de ses limitations.Je discute la nature de circularité conceptuelle et argumentative, j’argumenteque la circularité conceptuelle ne s’applique pas à toutes les théories véricon-ditionnelles de la modalité et que, de plus, la circularité argumentative nes’applique pas. Il n’y a rien d’erroné, en principe, avec les théories de la mo-dalité en termes non modaux, mais les questions épistémologiques présentessont significatives et ont été trop peu traitées. Je conclus que le dilemme deBlackburn est insuffisant pour défricher le terrain pour sa propre conceptionquasi-réaliste de la modalité.

Abstract: In this paper I present Simon Blackburn’s dilemma for truth con-ditional theories of modality and discuss its limitations. I discuss the natureof conceptual and argumentative circularity and argue that conceptual circu-larity does not apply to all of the main truth conditional theories of modalityand that, likewise, argumentative circularity does not apply. There is noth-ing wrong, in principle, with theories of the modal in non-modal terms, butattending epistemological issues are significant and have been given too littleattention. I conclude that Blackburn’s dilemma is insufficient for clearing theway for his own quasi-realist account of modality.

Introduction

Simon Blackburn is a quasi-realist about both moral and modal dis-course. His position is realist because he accepts that we sometimesspeak truly when we say that some things are right and others wrong.Likewise when we say that some things are possible and others not. Itis “merely” quasi-realism, though, because he parts company with manyrealists regarding what it is for a claim regarding morals or modals to betrue. Realists typically want the truth of claims about subject matters


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regarding which they are realists to be a matter of something “objective”,something “out there”, something not wholly about us and our beliefs,or our conceptual capabilities or linguistic practices. Blackburn eschewsthis portion of typical realist ideology for moral and modal claims. Wecan have truth, but there is no “out there” about it. The facts thatmake for the truth or falsity of various utterances in moral or modaldiscourses are facts about us; they are our own attitudes/commitmentsthat we project onto the world and this projection gives us an illusionof a certain kind of fact-based objectivity. Moral and modal truth is notabout moral or modal facts; it is about our attitudes regarding actions,events, objects, and the like.

Developing a projectivist theory of the modal is all very well. Supposethat it were done. It would have little force in warranting the acceptanceof the theory. A developed theory is nothing more than a philosophicalJust So story. Might be; might not be. What separates a Just So storyfrom a theory that has some claim on rational assent is some groundfor thinking the theory true—either reasons in favour of the theory orreasons against the going alternatives. Blackburn produces an argu-ment that purports to show that realist theories that are any more than“quasi-” lead us to think that there are facts of certain kinds when thereare none. It is this argument regarding modals that will be the subjectof the remainder of this paper.

The Argument

Blackburn’s argument works at a very high level of generality. He is notconcerned with some paradox that is peculiar to David Lewis’s specificrealism about modality, which involves the claim that there is a pluralityof concrete worlds that are the truth conditions for true modal claims.Nor is he concerned with the deficiencies of theories of possible worldsthat are likewise realist and truth conditional in their semantics but withpossible worlds of some different kind. Blackburn’s argument is supposedto show that there is something fundamentally misguided about anytheory of the modal that is an articulation of the view that the truthand falsity of various modal claims is a matter of truth conditions. Heclaims that some modal claims are true and some modal claims are false,just not that their truth/falsity consists in some conditions, howevercomplex and wherever located. Not only is Lewis’s truth conditionaltheory rejected, but so are theories that claim that the truth conditionsare conditions of us, whether psychological or linguistic. The entire truth

Blackburn’s Rejection of Modals 95

conditional programme for the modal is misguided. His argument, then,is intended as a silver bullet argument against all forms of realism aboutmodals.

The argument is as follows. Consider a theory of the modal, a theorythat specifies the truth conditions for some claim regarding necessity.Its form would be a bi-conditional stating that it is necessary that Aif and only if some fact, F , obtains.1 Consider the fact F . Is thisfact modal in character or not? If it is necessary, then the theory isthat it is necessary that A if and only if some necessary fact obtains.Such a theory is inadequate because “there will be the same bad residual‘must’ ” [Blackburn 1993, 53]. Suppose, then, that F is not a modal fact.Then there is a mismatch between the sides of the bi-conditional. Onthe one side is the claim that something is necessary; on the other, afact with no modal force. Consequently, “there is strong pressure to feelthat the original necessity has not been explained or identified, so muchas undermined” [Blackburn, 1993, 53]. A fact with no modal force ispatently inadequate as the truth condition for a claim involving necessity.If neither modal facts nor non-modal facts are adequate for a theory ofthe modal, then on the modest assumption that all facts are either modalor non-modal, no truth conditional theory of the modal is adequate.

The Purpose of a Theory

Blackburn is objecting to a certain kind of theory: one that purports tobe both explanatory and truth conditional. Though he puts his concernin terms of judgements, truth, and truth conditions, he need not. Hecould simply frame things in terms of that in which necessity consists,with ‘A’ and ‘F ’ merely being dummies which, in the hands of differenttheorists, might take different things as substituends. If ‘A’ stands forsome truth bearer or other, then the issue might be one of necessary truthand ‘F ’ might stand for some non-linguistic state of the world. Or, ‘A’might do duty for states which are themselves taken to be necessary,such as four being twice two and ‘F ’ might stand for some other statesof numbers or sets or structures. Blackburn does not separate meta-linguistic from object language issues. Following suit, I note only thatthere are subtleties that deserve further attention, but I leave those foranother occasion.

1The appeal to facts is intended to be as uncontroversial as possible. I attributeto no party any more than appeal to worldly conditions, like the cat’s being on themat. Whether these conditions have anything to do with universals, for example, issomething on which I can remain neutral here.

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The fundamental problem that Blackburn thinks he has identified isthe inevitable failure of explanation that will attend any “direct” theoryof modality. A dilemma akin to the Euthryphro dilemma is posed. Onone horn is a problem something like circularity. On the other is theproblem that the theory remains unsatisfying, even if not circular. Itis not question begging to suspect that something is awry, since oneadvocating this argument gives the appearance of being impossible tosatisfy. Blackburn takes the argument to show not that no theory of themodal whatever is adequate but only that no truth-conditional, non-projectivist, theory is adequate.

In setting his own quasi-realist alternative against all truth condi-tional approaches, Blackburn needs his argument to work against ratherdifferent understandings of the point of a truth-conditional theory of themodal.

“Within this conception of the philosopher’s quest, there isroom for disagreement over detail—for instance, whether thedescription of the state of affairs finally fixed upon as makingtrue the original modal judgement has to be synonymouswith that judgement; whether one range of arguments oranother succeeds in showing some concepts to be defective,or over what would count as an admissible reduction classfor the modal claims.” [Blackburn 1993, 53]

With the remainder of this paper I will argue that closer attention tothese details is necessary for assessing the effectiveness of the dilemmaposed by Blackburn. Since the first horn of the dilemma is a circularity-like problem, I will begin by examining when circularity is a problem.

First, to what sort of theory is circularity even so much as relevant?Certainly, any theory that purports to be an illuminating conceptualanalysis is a failure if the analysans uses the very concept to be anal-ysed. Circularity in analyses, like circularity in arguments, is not asimple, straightforward matter though. One might say that an argu-ment is circular if the conclusion appears as a premise in its own proof.This account of circularity expresses at least a sufficient condition fora kind of circularity in argument that undermines the effectiveness ofthe argument. It is most dubious, though, as a statement of conditionsthat are both necessary and sufficient for circularity. One would be hardpressed to find any argument proposed by a reputable philosopher thatfailed because its proponent failed to spot the conclusion hiding, explic-itly, among the premises. Likewise, analyses rarely, if ever, fail becausethe very concept to be analyzed was used in the analysis.


In an argument, it is much more likely that circularity is presentwhen one introduces a premise for which one would be hard pressed toprovide adequate grounds without appealing to the conclusion of thecircular argument. In analyses, it is more likely that one concept is anal-ysed in terms of others and the crucial concepts in the analysandum andthe analysans form a tightly-knit family of concepts and, furthermore,the legitimacy of the entire family is the matter of philosophical dis-pute. Given that Blackburn’s task is to provide grounds for a non-truth-conditional, projectivist understanding of modal discourse and given thatthis argument for the general untenability of truth conditional accountsis to provide some of those grounds, it is this reliance on a tightly-knitfamily of concepts that is in question. To say that A is necessary ifand only if it is not possible that not-A is certainly to avoid the first,simple-minded, kind of circularity and it would be uncharitable to thinkthat the circularity at issue was one so easily avoided. Since, however,necessity and possibility are so closely related and given the breadth ofBlackburn’s overall project, it is the status of the entire family of alethicmodal notions that is in question. So, if our theory of the modal is tobe a conceptual analysis and if the issue is whether the entire family ofmodal concepts is philosophically respectable, then the standard anal-ysis of necessity in terms of possibility and negation that one finds intextbooks is clearly inadequate.

The Purpose of Analysis

“Analytic” philosophers hark back to a time when Anglo-American phi-losophy took as its raison d’être the analysis of concepts. Though theexplicit rationale for taking philosophy to be conceptual analysis wasthe elimination of metaphysics and all intellectual things insufficientlyanswerable to experience, the focus on metaphysics, ethics, and reli-gious belief obscured the primary value that was to be maximized viaconceptual analysis, i.e., some epistemic value that I shall label “war-rant". That there were metaphysicians who seemed to say unverifiableor unfalsifiable things was a problem only because the apparent lack ofverifiability/falsifiability for metaphysical claims meant that one impor-tant means of providing warrant for a non-trivial claim was unavailable.Furthermore, one important means of gaining agreement to a metaphys-ical claim by way of rational persuasion was unavailable. Consequently,metaphysics gave the appearance of being unmoored, of being the projectof constructing systems with no generally-accepted means of adjudicat-

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ing between them.

Conceptual analysis promised to provide a means of securing warrantfor philosophical claims. If philosophical claims are about the interre-lations among concepts, and if conceptual content is sufficiently trans-parent, then with the guidance of an expert philosopher we could cometo see that some philosophical claims deserved our assent and othersdid not. The project of analysis was gradually replaced, partly becauseof critiques of the ideological foundations of conceptual analysis [Quine1953] and partly, I suspect, because fewer issues were settled than onemight have expected if conceptual content were sufficiently transparentto us. As a result, metaphysics was revived and other domains tookon the appearance of metaphysics at least to this extent: philosophersgradually spoke less in terms of the meaning of ‘cause’, ‘natural right’,or ‘knowledge’; they spoke instead of what causation, natural rights, andknowledge are. It was no longer what the content of a concept was. Per-haps our concepts are not well-behaved, or they are poorly structured,or they are otherwise inadequate for all of our intellectual endeavours.No matter. We are really interested in what it is for two events or factsto be causally related, or what it is to have rights by nature, or what itis to know something. Whether the relevant information has ever beenpacked into our concepts is irrelevant, if upon investigation we couldarrive at an acceptable theory of the relevant phenomenon.

The pertinent question for us now is what kind of philosophical theoryis it against which Blackburn presses his dilemma? If the offendingtheory is supposed by its proponents to be a conceptual analysis, thenthe charge of circularity is relevant. If the theory is not intended as aconceptual analysis and if it is to be a theory of what it is, in reality,for something to be necessary, then some further account of a differentdefect, perhaps so analogous to the two kinds of circularity canvassedabove that it deserves the same name, must be given.

Conceptual Projects

Suppose the project is to legitimize the use of the family of modal no-tions that includes the notions of necessity, possibility, contingency, andimpossibility. It is a commonplace now to concede that these notionsform a family of inter-definable notions, so long as we have purely logi-cal notions like negation to hand. Because of their inter-definability, itis difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that necessity is the conceptu-ally fundamental member of the family while the others are defined in


terms of it. If the task of a theory of the modal is to provide a routeinto understanding one concept in terms of others that can be under-stood prior to the concept analysed, then perhaps the phenomenon ofinter-definability prevents success. One either has mastery of all mem-bers of that modal family or of none at all. Blackburn, however, is notconcerned with the success of this project. He objects neither that heor others fail to understand the concepts nor that understanding doesnot begin with a single conceptual ancestor for the rest of the family.He takes for granted that we have the appropriate understanding, how-ever it is achieved. His concern is the substance behind our sensibleand competent use of the concepts, and for that he provides his quasi-realist alternative. So, while the dilemma he poses would be sufficientto prevent success in completing this kind of task, this task is not histarget.

A different metaphorical way of thinking about this particular taskis to think that modal concepts are part of a conceptual structure. Thatstructure is well-founded, if it has foundations, i.e., if there are fun-damental concepts in terms of which all others are analysed. If it isassumed that the modal structure is a superstructure, then the modalsuperstructure requires non-modal foundations. On such a picture, thefamily of inter-definable concepts is inadequate to supply these founda-tions, since each member of the family is part of the superstructure.

Continuing the metaphor, why should we think, that the modalstructure is part of the conceptual superstructure? Why not, rather,think that it is part of the foundations of any sophisticated conceptualstructure? If modal concepts are not definable in terms of non-modalconcepts, that is evidence that when we reach those concepts we havereached conceptual bedrock. If so, then the inter-definability of modalconcepts is unsurprising. Consider Euclidean geometry. Point, line seg-ment, line, plane. Pick one and with uncontroversial resources, the otherscan be defined. These four concepts form a tightly-knit family of inter-definable notions. No philosopher of mathematics, however, is exercisedover the legitimacy over Euclidean geometry on the basis of the inter-definability of these concepts. Instead, all take the family to form partof the conceptual basis for geometry. It is an interesting question howone can come to grasp concepts that form a small conceptual circle, butthe geometry case demonstrates that whether we provide a satisfactorytheory of how this is done, the lack of such a theory in no way providesgrounds for thinking that the phenomenon does not occur. It mani-festly does and all parties find this so obvious in the case of fundamentalgeometric concepts that the issue is rarely raised.

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The circularity horn of Blackburn’s dilemma not only may be grasped,but it is grasped by those who take modality, i.e., at least one modalconcept, to be primitive. Modalists look at this horn and see not onlynothing troubling, but they also see nothing surprising. Graeme Forbes,for instance, explicitly embraces modal concepts as basic to show thatDavid Lewis’s possible worlds discourse provides no theoretical advan-tage when it comes to expressing truths about possibility [Forbes 1985].This horn of the dilemma, then, is inadequate by itself. Were the hornsupplemented with some further considerations, it might form part ofan overall basis for rejecting modalism in particular and truth condi-tional theories of modality in general. Perhaps the considerations thatmotivated the early Analytic philosophers could be invoked here andarguments could be given that there is too little agreement on modalmatters to think that we employ modal concepts to good effect for ex-pressing truths. Perhaps, there is no good modal epistemology that couldform part of an overall modalist framework. Perhaps our use of modaldiscourse fails to show the signs of the kind of truth and objectivitythat the typical modalist wants [Wright 1993]. None of these, though, isBlackburn’s strategy. His dilemma is supposed to be sufficient to see offof any truth conditional theory of modality, even one that takes modalnotions as enabling us to express basic features of the world. Once wewere to have seen that there is something deeply misguided by the en-tire truth conditional approach, we were to be open to the quasi-realistalternative. Since the phenomenon given in the first horn is part of themodalist’s theory, it cannot be effective against the modalist’s theory.Were we to go no further, we have grounds for thinking that—so far asBlackburn has argued—there are at least two going alternatives in thetheory of modality: modalism and quasi-realism.

Non-Conceptual Projects

Given the kinds of theories that Blackburn must have had in mind,it is clear that those theories were not really intended as conceptualanalyses. David Lewis made clear that his project was not conceptualanalysis [Lewis, 1986]. If it had been he would not have relied as he did oninference to the best explanation as the main means of providing warrantfor his version of the ontology of a plurality of concrete worlds. Lewisrecommended using inference to the best explanation to justify his theorypartly because it showed philosophical justification to be similar to themeans of justification used by scientists. This parallel with scientific


justification could not have been maintained plausibly had Lewis thoughthis project to be that of the conceptual analyst. Whereas conceptualanalysis is the pursuit of a set of concepts that means precisely whatthat to be analysed means, inference to the best explanation is meant asan evidence-providing exercise that, if successful, raises the probability ofthe conclusion which articulates that which is to be the best explanationfor the phenomena reported in the premises of the inference.

If conceptual analysis was not the project for Lewis and others, thenthe relevance of Blackburn’s dilemma to the going theories of modalityis not immediately obvious. Perhaps the circularity is not really concep-tual, but metaphysical. Perhaps it is not that the concept of possibilitycan be defined only by way of other modal concepts that are part ofthe same conceptual family, but that in order for Lewis’s account to becorrect, it must be the case that all and only the possible worlds exist.Not just any old set of worlds will do. Blackburn does not make thisparticular point explicitly, though something like it has been made in[Lycan 1979], [McGinn 1981], and [Shalkowski 1994]. I will not pursuethis consideration further both because it is not Blackburn’s and be-cause it seems to inhabit some middle ground between conceptual andargumentative circularity.

If conceptual circularity is not at issue for many contemporary truthconditional theories of the modal, perhaps the arguments given for therelevant theories are circular. Perhaps, for example, Lewis’s theory thatsomething is possible if and only if it occurs or exists in some concreteworld can be accepted as extensionally adequate only if one has someprior justification for accepting that there really is a plurality of alland only genuinely possible concrete worlds. If there were impossibleconcrete worlds or if the plurality were missing some worlds that arepossible, then the analysis would not be extensionally adequate. Rulingout such states of the plurality, perhaps, could be done only after onehad accepted the general Lewis-style account.

If this is the problem, we can make some progress if we ask what issupposed to be so bad about argumentative circularity. “It is necessarythat A if and only if necessarily A” is not false, even if wholly uselessas an illuminating analysis. Likewise, inferring that it is necessary thatA from the premise that it is necessary that A will never lead one fromtruth to falsity. So, what is the problem supposed to be? The faultyanalysis need not be false and the faulty argument need not lead to aconclusion that is false.

Argumentative circularity is troublesome because it prevents an ad-vocate of that argument from persuading one of the conclusion on itsbasis. A necessary condition for an argument being persuasive is that


one believes the premises and understands that the premises providegood grounds for the conclusion. Acceptance of the conclusion needsto be on the basis of a prior acceptance of the premises. A circularargument prevents this priority condition on rational persuasion fromobtaining. Hence, circularity is an argumentative defect and the defectis epistemic. A circular argument fails to impart entitlement to embracethe conclusion to one who accepts the conclusion on the basis of thatargument.

Against the modern metaphysician, as contrasted with the conceptualanalyst, Blackburn’s dilemma becomes this: by virtue of not being aconceptual analysis, the form of the theory does not, by itself, generatesufficient confidence in the theory. The schematic theory is that it isnecessary that A if and only if F , for some non-modal F . Any defenceof this theory will either make plain that F is sufficient for the necessityof A by way of circularity, or else the argument will fail to demonstratethat A really is necessary in virtue of F . For metaphysicans wary offraming their theory in terms of “in virtue of”, an exactly parallel problemcan be posed regarding the extensional adequacy of the theory: eitherthe argument that the non-modal F is extensionally adequate for thenecessity of A is circular or else the argument will fail to demonstratethe adequacy of the non-modal F for the necessity of A.

Lewis, at least, took great care to avoid any charge of circularity inhis use of inference to the best explanation. The strategy was to spec-ify things for which philosophers want theories, show that if the thesisabout a plurality of worlds were true, we could provide a single, uni-fied theory of those things. Certainly, there are competing theories forthe truth conditions of modal claims, the semantics for counterfactualconditionals, the natures of properties and propositions, etc. Each ofthose competing theories is, however, a single-issue theory. Lewis’s the-ory provides a single framework within which one can provide theoriesof all of these things. As scientists take theoretical unification as a markof scientific truth, so Lewis takes philosophical unification as a mark ofphilosophical truth. The inference to the best explanation generates nomore circularity for metaphysical theories than it does for physical the-ories. So the first horn of our new dilemma can be avoided, if inferenceto the best explanation is legitimate in metaphysics.2

Consider now the second horn, according to which there is no residual“must” but a fugitive “must”. Any theory stating that the truth condi-tions for a necessary A in terms of some non-modal F inadvertently

2I argue that inference to the best explanation is not legitimate in metaphysics inInference to the Best Explanation and Metaphysical Projects [Shalkowski forthcom-ing].


renders the A unnecessary. The A is supposed to have modal force, butthe F is not. Thus, any theory of the necessity of four’s being twice twowill, in effect drain four’s being twice two of all modal force.3

The mistake of this inference can be seen by focusing on reductivetheories in science, since Lewis models the justification of his own viewon the justification for these theories. Let us bracket any question ofthe modal status of scientific reductions, since scientists may or may notthink that the scientific reductions they propose are necessary. Whenasked what lightning is, we are told that lightning is the discharge ofstatic electricity either between clouds or between clouds and the surfaceof the earth. Here we have a theory of lightning in non-lightning terms.No problem. If there is a problem for theories of modality that are givenin non-modal terms, it is not that they are theories of A-things in termsof non-A-things, where we categorize A-things and non-A-things on thebasis of the concepts we use to specify them. If it really is the case thatsomething is possible if and only if it occurs/exists in some concreteworld that is just one among many, why is that any less adequate thanthe modern theory of lightning?

The troublesome difference is epistemic. In the scientific case, thetheory identifying lightning with the discharge of static electricity is noteven accepted unless investigators are in a position to identify occur-rences of lightning and discharges of static electricity independently ofeach other. I, being rather incompetent as an experimenter about allthings electrical, am capable of identifying times and locations of light-ning strikes. Someone else who is well schooled in the fine art of detectingdischarges of static electricity can set up the relevant devices to measuresuch discharges. I can keep my log about where and when I see strikes oflightning during a storm and the intrepid weather scientist can likewisekeep a log of discharges. Later, we can compare notes. We repeat theprocedure at other times and with other investigators. At some stagewe might reasonably conclude that lightning is nothing but dischargesof static electricity because we have never confronted cases where wewere in a position to observe both the phenomenon as lightning and thephenomenon as a discharge of static electricity and where the time andlocation of the lightning was not also a time and location of a dischargeof static electricity. We may be well aware that an inference from this

3This is not to say that the account renders it contingent that four is twice two. Iffour is twice two but might not have been, then four’s being twice two is contingent.The second horn of the dilemma is that for any non-modal F, A has no modal forceat all.


unbroken correlation among observations is not conclusive grounds forthinking that these phenomena are identical, but at some point we takethe grounds to be more than sufficient.

The problem with metaphysical theories of modality is not their form;it is their means of justification. What is missing from typical metaphysi-cal theories—not just metaphysical theories of modality—is independentaccess to phenomena described using different vocabulary. We can ob-serve that some things are red and some green. What we do not observeindependently is the universals of redness and greenness being instanti-ated or the presence of the trope of this gown’s redness and that ball’sgreenness. Our access to the universals or the tropes is solely by way ofphilosophical theory. This is the same kind of problem that those whopursued semantic analysis as the proper task of philosophers sought toavoid and the problem to which metaphysicians need to devote moreattention.

Suppose we were in a position regarding possibilities and the statesof the plurality of worlds as we are regarding lightning and dischargesof static electricity. What could the problem be? It might be somewhatsurprising that possibility really is just existence. We had not expectedthat because we had been thinking that there is only one world and,consequently, we had been thinking that what exists does not exhaustwhat is possible. We had also been thinking that the possible was notco-extensive with the necessary. If we keep the latter but give up the for-mer, then we lose our resistance to thinking that existence somewhere isreally what possibility comes to and that existence everywhere (suitablyqualified) is what necessity comes to. Blackburn is right regarding thesecond horn of his dilemma to this extent: so long as we keep in place allof our initial, metaphysically-naïve assumptions, a theory of the modalin non-modal terms will appear inadequate. If, to continue to use Lewis’stheory as our example, it turns out that every warranted judgement wemake about possibility is correlated with existence in some world, thenwe should not take our initial surprise as a philosophical trump card anymore than believers in Zeus’s hurling lightning bolts at the earth whenangry should take their initial surprise that Zeus might have nothing todo with lightning as a trump card against scientific accounts of lightning.Initial intellectual surprises can be overcome with sufficient grounds. Theproblem, then, is mis-diagnosed by Blackburn in the second horn of hisdilemma. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with giving a theory ofA-things in terms of non-A-things, assuming that it is not intended as aconceptual analysis. If there is a problem with a theory of the modal interms of the non-modal, it is not the initial “pressure” we feel to thinkthat the theory fails. It is a matter of wider epistemic issues that the


dilemma does not touch.

Conclusion

Blackburn’s generalisation of the Euthyphro dilemma is inadequate tothe task to which he wanted to put it. It is insufficient as grounds forcasting aside all forms of truth conditional accounts of the modal. If allsuch accounts of the modal required both that the theory be a conceptualanalysis and that the analysis permit one to break into the circle of modalconcepts and attain mastery of modal concepts, then the dilemma wouldeffectively show all truth conditional theories to fail. On might take theproject to be that of providing a conceptual analysis, but not one thatis sufficient to gain competence with all modal vocabulary. Any suchsemantic account would assume some modal competence and would serveonly to characterise relations among different modal concepts and couldnot legitimize the entire domain of our modal conceptual framework. Aconceptual analysis of the modal in non-modal terms does fail for thereason Blackburn suggests: the analysis does not wear its adequacy onits sleeve the way conceptual analyses should.

Most truth conditional theories of the modal, however, are not in-tended as conceptual analyses of either sort. There are modalist accountsaccording to which some modal concepts are fundamental, i.e., for whichthere are no non-modal equivalents. Unless one holds the thesis that ev-ery concept is subject to an analysis in terms more basic concepts, theremust be some basic concepts at which conceptual analysis stops.4 Whynot some modal concept or other? The dilemma does nothing to answerthis question. There are other, more metaphysical, theories that maynot even address the issue of the meaning of modal concepts, but onlythe truth conditions of modal claims. Since they do not even pretend toexpress the meaning of modal concepts, then the fact that understand-ing an account of the modal in terms of the non-modal does not bringwarrant for believing the account is itself insufficient to show that ac-count really to be inadequate. Such a theory must, surely, fit with somesuitable account not only of how one can come to have warranted beliefabout particular modal claims—like the claim that four is twice two—but also how one could come to have warranted belief in that particular

4If there are analyses “all the way down”, then one must confront the question ofhow it is that one can begin the process of concept acquisition, if the process continuesinfinitely, or the question of why large conceptual circles are philosophically adequate,but small ones are not.

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truth conditional theory of modality. These epistemic issues are impor-tant and too-little addressed in the philosophy of modality. That thesedeserve more attention than they have received does nothing, however, toundermine the contention of this paper: that Blackburn’s dilemma failsto show something wrong with all truth conditional theories of modality.It fails to show that we have a philosophical itch that should be dealtwith in some way other than by finding a truth conditional theory thatreaches the itch so that it can be scratched.

References

Blackburn, Simon

1986 Morals and Modals, Fact, Science and Morality, Graham Mac-Donald (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 119–141. Citations from SimonBlackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism, New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1993, 52–74.

Forbes, Graeme

1985 The Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lewis, David

1986 On the Plurality of Worlds, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Lycan, William

1979 The Trouble with Possible Worlds, The Possible and the Actual,Michael J. Loux (ed.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 274–316.

McGinn, Colin

1981 Modal Reality, Reduction, Time and Reality, Richard Healey(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143–188.

Quine, W.V.O.

1951 Two Dogmas of Empiricism, The Philosophical Review, 60, 20–43. Reprinted in W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View 2nd

ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1961: 20–46.

Shalkowski, Scott A.

1994 The Ontological Ground of the Alethic Modality, The Philo-sophical Review, 103, 669–688.

Forthcoming Inference to the Best Explanation and MetaphysicalProjects, in Bob Hale, Ross Cameron, and Aviv Hoffman (eds),The Logic, Epistemology, and Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Wright, Crispin

1993 Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Part III

Truths

Three Forms of Pluralism about Truth

Michael P. LynchUniversity of Connecticut (USA)

Résumé : Le pluralisme aléthique est la conception suivant laquelle il y aplus d’une manière pour des propositions d’être vraies. Cet article étudie troismanières de comprendre cette idée et argumente que chacune a des faiblessessignificatives. Je conclus en suggérant une issue au pluraliste qui lui permettede construire une position plus plausible.

Abstract: Alethic pluralism is the view that there is more than one way forpropositions to be true. This paper examines three ways of understanding thisidea and argues that each has significant flaws. It concludes by suggesting away for the pluralist to construct a more plausible position.

1 Introduction

Traditional theories of truth, such as the correspondence or coherenceaccounts, assume there is something substantive in common between alltruths, no matter what the subject, and they endeavor to say what thatsomething is. Such theories, in other words, are monist : truth is identicalto some single first-order property of propositions; and the truth conceptunivocally expresses that property.

A persistent problem for alethic monism is that it is exceedingly dif-ficult to find that common property in the face of the sheer diversity ofour thought. Theories that seem plausible when applied to propositionsabout the physical world around us (such as the correspondence theory)are less plausible when applied to propositions about norms. And the-ories that seem plausible when applied to the propositions about norms(such as, perhaps, the coherence theory) seem much less convincing whenapplied to propositions about the physical world. Indeed, and as a num-ber of philosophers have suggested, the history of the debate over truthsuggests that for any sufficiently robustly characterized truth property


110 Michael P. Lynch

F, there appears to be some kind of propositions K which lack F butwhich are intuitively true (or capable of being true). This can be calledthe scope problem [Lynch, 2001]1.

Philosophers generally adopt one of two strategies in response to thisproblem. Those adopting the first strategy hold fast to their favored the-ory of truth and deny that various troublesome propositions are true, oreven capable of being true. This is the strategy favored by expressivists,error-theorists, fictionalists and so on. The second strategy dismissesthe whole project of giving a metaphysical theory of truth, and declaresthat all propositions are equally apt for truth in a uniform but entirelythin sense. This is the deflationary strategy.

In this paper, I want to examine the prospects for a third response,namely that propositions can be true in different ways. This is alethicpluralism. Pluralism has been getting an increasing amount of atten-tion, and perhaps it is not hard to see why2. If the pluralist positioncan be made coherent, then there is more to say about truth than thedeflationist believes, but the more there is to say depends on the typeof proposition in question3. Moral propositions, for example, might betrue by being part of a coherent moral theory, while propositions aboutphysical objects might be true by corresponding to the facts about thoseobjects. If so, then we might be able to both heed Wittgenstein’s com-mand to mind the differences between forms of thought and yet still holdonto the idea that we can have true beliefs about morality or economicsor mathematics. We would have semantic diversity and our cognitivistcake too.

So much for motivation; in this paper I am interested not so muchin proving (or disproving) alethic pluralism as understanding it. I willbe particularly concerned with whether there is a plausible metaphysicaltheory underpinning the pluralist’s intuition that there is more than oneway for propositions to be true. I will examine three different ways ofgiving such a theory and argue that each has significant flaws. Nonethe-less, I end on a hopeful note: from the flaws of the above theories the

1Sher [2004] calls it the “disunity challenge”; she argues that Kant was the first tosee the problem.

2See, for example, [Wright 1992], [Sher 2004; 2005]; [Cory Wright 2005]; [Pedersen2006]; [Vision 2004]; [Tappolet 1997]; [Beall 2000] and [Lynch 2000; 2001; 2004; 2005;2006].

3In what follows, I will use “proposition” as my favored term for whatever bearsthe property of truth, but will occasionally speak indifferently of “assertions”, “state-ments”, “beliefs” and the like. When doing so, I should be taken to be talking aboutthe content of the assertion, statement or belief — that is, the proposition expressedby it.

Three Forms of Pluralism about Truth 111

pluralist can at least extract the seeds of a more realistic position.

2 Simple Alethic Pluralism

There is more than one way to interpret “there is more than one way for x

to be F ”. One way is to see it as advocating that “F ” is simply ambigu-ous, or that the word conveys different concepts in differing contexts.Applied to the present case, the thought is that “true” is ambiguous:sometimes it picks out one of the traditionally cited properties (e.g. cor-respondence), sometimes we use it to pick out another (e.g. coherence).Call this simple alethic pluralism (or SAP). I’m not sure anyone actuallyadvocates SAP, but lots of folks seem to think alethic pluralists must becommitted to it. They’re wrong, and it’s a good thing too; SAP is anon-starter.

There are three reasons to think so: they range from something of acheap-shot to the level of profound problem. The cheap-shot is that, toquote Kripke: “it is very much the lazy man’s approach in philosophyto posit ambiguities when in trouble” [Kripke 1977, 19]. It just seemstoo easy a way to get out of the vexing counterexamples to traditionaltheories of truth to claim that “is true” means, for example, “correspondsto the facts” when dealing with propositions about physical objects and“is a member of a coherent system of propositions” when dealing withmoral propositions. The suggestion smells of having all the virtue ofgrand theft auto over gainful employment. It is fun, but crime doesn’tpay.

This is not to say that positing ambiguity is never helpful in philos-ophy. But it is justified only on the basis of serious theoretical pressure.I don’t feel any such pressure here. Indeed, what pressure there is goesin quite the opposite direction, as others have noted [see Tappolet 1997],[Pedersen 2006]. In particular — and the second reason that SAP isa non-starter — is that it ignores the fact that a generally applicableconcept of truth fulfills some important logical needs.

Consider, for example, truth’s role in a ’mixed inference’ like:

If you jail a person without charge, you have violated hisrights. This person has been jailed without charge. There-fore, this person’s rights have been violated.

On a standard account of validity, an inference is valid when it pre-serves a single property — truth — from premises to conclusion. But


the propositions forming this particular argument are from different do-mains — the conclusion is normative while one of the premises is not.Naturally then, one would expect the advocate of SAP to hold that thepremises and the conclusion are true in literally different senses. If so,then contra the standard account of validity, there is no single propertybeing preserved from premises to conclusion.

We not only need a univocal concept of truth to explain the validityof mixed inferences: we also need it to explain mixed compounds [Lynch,2004], [Tappolet 1997]. Consider the conjunction that two and two makefour and murder is wrong. If “true” is ambiguous, in what sense is thisconjunction true? A mixed “mathematical/moral” sense?

Even more simply, SAP makes nonsense of blind generalizations in-volving truth [Lynch, 2004]. Suppose a devout believer says that “every-thing God believes is true”. She is not intending to say that “everythingthat God believes is true in one sense or another”. Her claim about Godis not like my claim that “Everything Bush says is funny”—where I inten-tionally trade on the fact that “funny” is ambiguous between “comedic”and “suspicious”. She means that everything God believes is true period.

The third point I’ll make about SAP is in some ways the simplestbut also the most important. SAP isn’t even pluralist view of truth atall. It is a pluralist view of the meaning of the word “true”. As such, onemight wonder if it even counts as a way of unpacking the basic pluralistintuition that there is more than one way of being true — since takenseriously, it simply denies this claim. Seen clearly, SAP would seem tofall victim to Nietzsche’s remark that, “there are many kinds of eyes— even the Sphinx has eyes. And there are many kinds of truth, andtherefore there is no truth” [Nietzsche WP: 540]. In other words, simplepluralism about truth is really a disguised form of truth nihilism. If wereally took it seriously, we’d just stop talking about what is true andtalk about the various properties the word ambiguously picks out.

3 Alethic Functionalism: the Basic Idea

Nietzsche, that old rascal, seems to have been right. So far, it seems likeif you say there are many types of truths, you are really just saying thereare none. Can we do better? That is, can we sympathizers to the basicpluralist intuition — that there are different ways in which propositionscan be true — do better in explaining that intuition? I think we can.The key is to acknowledge that there is a unity to truth — that the truthsform a kind, and therefore all share something in common. I suppose


this means we can’t be pluralist all the way. But we can preserve whatis worth preserving in the pluralist intuition.

As is common in philosophy, our stance toward the nature of truthis somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, we are puzzled by thequestion of what truth is, one the other, there is quite a bit about truththat is common knowledge. The philosopher’s favorite examples of thesecommonly held beliefs are instances of the T -schema, such as the propo-sition that grass is green is true if and only if grass is green. But thereare others. These include, for example, that it is good to believe what istrue; that what is true can’t be false; that believing doesn’t make it so;and that what is justified may not be true and what is true may not bejustified. So, on the one hand, we think that truth is deep, and on theother, we seem to already know what it is.

This needn’t be puzzling. We can see these intuitive beliefs as be-ing about truth’s job, or the role of true propositions in our cognitiveeconomy. Seen this way, it is not surprising that we have some intuitivebeliefs about truth that are common knowledge while remaining cluelessabout its nature. For it is a familiar fact that we can know about thejob of something, what it does, without knowing much about how it getsthat job done. And more to the present point, it is an even more familiarfact that one job can be done differently depending on the context.

What I’ve elsewhere called alethic functionalism [Lynch 2004] beginswith this thought. The basic idea is that to be true is to have a propertythat does a particular job or plays a particular role. That role is whatis specified by our intuitive beliefs about truth. These beliefs form atheoretical structure — a folk theory of truth if you will. Some of thesebeliefs illustrate the connections between truth and related semanticproperties, including e.g. “the proposition that p is true if and only if p”and “the negation of a true proposition is not true”; “to assert is to presentis true” and so on. While others relate truth to other sorts of properties,such as: “Other things being equal, it is good to believe that which istrue”; and “if a proposition is justified it may not be true”, and even“an honest person typically says what is true” and so on. Specifyingthe extent and limits of these folk beliefs, and determining which, ifany, are more centrally weighted than others, is an important furtherproject for the alethic functionalist, just as it is for functionalists inthe philosophy of mind. But however those questions are decided, thebasic functionalist idea is that these folk beliefs about truth to jointlyconstitute a job-description so to speak for truth: they specify the truth-role. Consequently, we can then say that a property plays that role justwhen it meets the conditions laid out in that job-description, and that a


proposition is therefore true just when it has a property that plays thatrole.

One obvious advantage of this general approach, and the one I’mhighlighting here, is that it would seem to allow us to capture, in a verystraightforward and familiar way, the basic intuition behind pluralism.That basic intuition is that there is more than one way for propositionsto be true. The functionalist framework obviously allows for this: itallows for the possibility that truth is multiply realized. Problem solved:propositions could be true in more than one way because it might turnout that there is more than one way to realize the truth-role. Moreover,the metaphysical picture here, as opposed to SAP, seems abundantlyclear: multiply realizable properties, after all, are a dime a dozen, andnot mysterious.

4 Reductive Alethic Functionalism

But of course this isn’t quite right. As anyone who has paid attention tothe philosophy of mind over the last three decades knows, there is a lotmore to say about how to understand the metaphysics of functionalism.Of particular relevance to our discussion is whether the alethic function-alist should identify truth with the realizer of the truth-role or the roleproperty itself.

To see the point here, note that so far, the alethic functionalist hassuggested is essentially this:

(1) A proposition in some domain is true just when it hasthe property T that plays the truth-role in that domain.

And we’ve defined that role relationally, by saying that something likethis:

(2) For any domain, < p > has a property T that plays thetruth-role just when to assert < p > is to present it as T ,the negation of < p > is not T ; it is good, other things beingequal to believe < p > when T and avoid believing it whennot. . .

Principles (1) and (2) state the conditions under which “x is true” istrue, according to the functionalist. But they do not tell us what theproperty of truth is. This is because (1) can be read in more than oneway.


One way of reading (1) is to see it as claiming that truth is identical towhatever property plays or realizes the truth-role. If there was only onesuch property and it was correspondence say, then on this interpretation,(1) tells us that truth is correspondence. But if we are sympathetic topluralism, we’ll want to leave open the possibility that the truth-role canbe occupied by more than one property. Accordingly, we’ll take it onthis view that “x is true” functions as a non-rigid definite description,one which can be satisfied by propositions have very different properties.In short hand: one descriptive concept: many properties picked out bythat concept.

This is the easiest way to understand how Crispin Wright looks attruth. Wright argues that we can give an account of the concept oftruth by laying out those few basic principles or “platitudes” which seemto describe the most fundamental facts about truth. These principlesare included among the folk beliefs about truth I mentioned above4.Together, Wright says, these and similar principles provide “a body ofconceptual truths that, without providing any reductive account, nev-ertheless collectively constrain and locate the target concept and suf-ficiently characterize some of its relations with other concepts and itsrole and purposes” [Wright 2001, 759]. Nonetheless, this account of theconcept is consistent with the idea that there may be more to say abouttruth, and “that the more there is to say may well vary from discourseto discourse [Wright 1992: 38]. Thus in some discourses or domains,the concepts we employ therein impose what Wright calls an evidentialconstraint : that is, that it is impossible for truth in that domain to out-run all evidence available in principle. In such domains, he suggests, aproposition might be true just when it is superassertible, or “justified bysome (in principle accessible) state of information and then remainingjustified no matter how that state of information might be enlarged uponor improved” [Wright 2001,771]. In other, more unrestrained domains,“the structure of truth is best conceived as by correspondence” [Wright1999, 225].

Early commentators took Wright to be advocating SAP. Wright rightlyprotested that this was a mistake. For on his account as I’ve just de-scribed it, there obviously is a single concept that “admits of a uniformcharacterization wherever it is applied — the characterization given bythe minimal platitudes. . . [Wright 1996, 101]. The form of pluralism rel-evant to his position, Wright contended, was therefore not SAP, but onethat allowed that there is one concept of truth, but that concept picks

4For a fuller account of the relevant principles, see [Wright 1999, 227; 2001, 759–761].


out more than one property.

Seen through the clarifying light of functionalism, Wright’s sugges-tion amounts to our first interpretation above. On this view, “is true”is more like “is the color of the sky at noon” than “is magnetic”. It is adisguised definite description of a property. But unlike “the color of thesky at noon”, which picks out different properties in different environ-mental contexts, as it were, “truth”, on Wright’s view, refers to differentproperties in different propositional domains. Thus when saying it istrue that acts of cruelty are wrong we ascribe one property; when sayingthat it is true that there is a book on the table, we ascribe another.Nonetheless, in both cases —as with “the color of the sky at noon”— weemploy a single concept, even though what property we pick out withthat concept differs.

Seen this way, Wright’s pluralism is reductive in nature, and thusakin to other reductive functionalisms, such as those championed byDavid Lewis [1980] and more recently, by Jaegwon Kim with regard topsychological properties [1998]. On this sort of view, there is no factabout whether, e.g., x is in pain over and above whether x has somephysical property P , and so “there is no need to think of [pain] itself asa property in its own right” [Kim 1998, 104]. A reductive alethic func-tionalism is parallel: there is no fact of the matter whether a propositionis true over and above whether it has some lower-level property like su-perassertibility or correspondence. Consequently, “truth” does not namea property shared by all truths.

Is reductive alethic pluralism an improvement over SAP? I don’t seethat it is. To my ear, it is prima facie implausible that “truth” functionsin this way — that it does not rigidly pick out the same property inevery possible domain. Admittedly using my own intuitions as a guide,it certainly feels like I’m talking about the same property when I talkabout the truth of moral propositions and the truth of mathematicalpropositions. My semantic intuitions, in other words, don’t lead me tothink that “truth” is like “the color of the sky at noon”.

Further, reductive functionalism/pluralism is hard to distinguish fromdeflationism about truth. Deflationists take our concept of truth to be amere logical device for making generalizations: it is a handy conceptualtool for generalizing over potentially infinite strings of propositions. Inparticular, appeals to the property of truth serve no explanatory purpose:we don’t need to appeal to it to explain any philosophically importantphenomena. Nonetheless, the leading contemporary deflationists canand often do grant there is a “property” of truth in an honorific sense[Horwich, 1998], [Field, 2001]. True propositions all have the property of


falling under the concept of truth or being correctly called “true”. But fordeflationists, to admit this is to admit nothing important: the honorificproperty of truth is explanatorily inert and metaphysically transparent:it does nothing over and above the logical work done by the concept,and there is nothing to say about it.

Reductive functionalism is quite close to this position: there is noproperty picked out by “truth” that is shared by all and only the truepropositions. Rather, there is simply a uniform concept — shorthand forthe truth job description. Of course, like the deflationist, the reductivefunctionalist could admit that there is an honorific property of falling un-der the description that all truths share in common. But — and this isthe important point — the reductive functionalist about truth is barredfrom identifying even this wafer-thin property with the property of truth.For the property of being a property that falls under the descriptiveconcept of truth doesn’t itself fall under that description. At least notobviously. But if not, it is not itself a realizer of the truth-role. Hencea view which identifies truth with whatever property realizes the truth-role must hold that the honorific property is distinct from truth: call ittruth*. And this in turn makes it hard to see how realizer functionalismreally avoids the problems incurred by SAP. There is a property pre-served by valid mixed inferences, yes, truth*, but it isn’t truth5. Truthitself becomes an idle wheel.

For antideflationists like me, this couldn’t be more wrong: truth is avery useful explanatory property indeed. Among other things, we thinkthat we need to appeal to truth, for example, to explain the normativefacts of assertion and belief — why some assertions and beliefs are correctand others not. Moreover we need it to explain intentionality — how ourmind represents the physical world around us. Deflationists obviouslydisagree that we need a substantive property of truth to explain thesethings, and I won’t get into those debates here. My point is that ifWright wants to avoid deflationism — and he does — then he shouldn’thold Wright’s view of truth. For deflationism is what Wright’s minimalpluralism essentially is; it is more minimal than pluralist. Like SAP,

5Wright can point out that there remain at least two senses in which his view isnot deflationary. First, even if there isn’t a single property shared by all and onlytruths, there are properties shared by mathematical truths, moral truths, physicaltruths and so on are. Second, Wright’s view of the concept is also more robust thanthe deflationists’. For the average run of the mill deflationist, all we have to say aboutthe concept of truth is captured by one principle: the T -schema (or its instances).In contrast, Wright, as we noted above, thinks that the concept is fixed by a numberof principles. But as argued in the text, the fact remains that there is no uniqueexplanatorily potent property shared by all and only the truths.


Wright ends up less of a pluralist about truth then he seems.

5 Role Alethic Functionalism?

So if alethic functionalism is going to make sense as a genuine alternativeview of truth, not to mention the best chance for unpacking the intuitionbehind pluralism, then realizer functionalism is not the way to go. It willcome as no surprise to hear that I think a somewhat better route is themore traditional functionalist one: identify truth with the role propertynot the realizer.

If we do so, we can still endorse (1) and (2) above. But we give thema different metaphysical gloss. What we conclude is that

RF: The property being true just is the property having aproperty that plays the truth-role.

Truth, in other words, is what is sometimes called a 2nd order property:a proposition has the property truth when it has the property of havinga property that plays the truth-role.

A full-dress account of this position, as I’ve given elsewhere, is ofcourse more complicated [Lynch 2001], [Lynch 2004]. But even so bluntlyput, we can see that there are clear advantages to role functionalism.

First, it keeps what is good about monism. What the monists haveright is that the word “true” is a rigid predicator; it neither changesits meaning or reference from context to context. If truth is the roleproperty, then there is a single property that all true propositions share,and “truth” rigidly designates that property in every domain and everyworld. Consequently, it is that single property that is preserved in validinferences and ascribed in blind generalizations involving truth.

Second, it also keeps what we want in pluralism. Indeed, it explainsthe pluralist über-thought — there is more than one way to be true —better than the above views by far. It takes that thought literally: byshowing how one property — truth — can be realized in distinct ways.

Third, it therefore avoids the Nietzschean worry: there is such aproperty of truth — it is the role property.

There is, alas, trouble in paradise. RF has its attractions; but con-trary to what I’ve suggested elsewhere [Lynch 2004], I don’t think thatrole functionalism is the best way of capturing the core pluralist thought.Three worries count against it.


The first worry concerns characterizing the relevant relation betweentruth and its bases as realization. We typically think of the relation be-tween a realizing property and its associated role-property as contingent.The fact that a particular piece of metal realizes the cork-screw role isnot metaphysically necessary. It is contingent on, among other things,the make-up of corks and the laws of nature. Of course, if we hold thesefacts fixed, then it will be necessary, relative to those facts, that beingthat hunk of metal realizes the being a cork-screw. But these furtherfacts are themselves contingent. So it remains an a posteriori physicalnecessity that the hunk is a corkscrew.

But now the problem is apparent: whatever relationship truth as suchhas to specific properties that play the truth-role — that is, however weunderstand property dependency in this case— that relationship is notcontingent. It isn’t a natural fact — if it is fact at all — that, forexample, superassertibility is a way of being true. Nor is it plausiblya posteriori. We aren’t going to determine whether some property is away of being true in the lab.

The second worry concerns thinking of truth as a 2nd order property.2nd order or “role” properties face familiar problems concerning explana-tory power. Of course, whether truth is itself an explanatory propertyis a vexed issue. But assume for the moment that it is: that, for exam-ple, we need to appeal to truth to explain the success of our actions (byappealing to the fact that to succeed, I need to have true beliefs abouthow to get what I want). According to the present idea, whenever x

has the role-property of truth, it also has the realizer property. So onemight naturally wonder: if in a particular domain, truth is correspon-dence with fact, won’t appealing to our beliefs that do so correspondbe an equally good explanation of the success of our relevant actions?Indeed, might it not be better, given that this is how truth is realizedin that domain? And shouldn’t that make us suspicious of the reality ofthe role property?

The third worry is simplest, and is an echo of one of the complaintswe raised against Wright’s view above. The role functionalist says, ineffect, that truth is the property of having some property that has certainfeatures. But does the role property itself have those features? That is,it seems that we want to say that truth itself is objective and a goal ofinquiry. But the property of having a property that is a goal of inquirya goal of inquiry? Not obviously; indeed, obviously not.

This point brings to light a flaw in the whole 2nd order propertyapproach to functional properties. The basic functionalist strategy looksto identify a property via certain features the property is said to have by


our folk understanding of the property. Together, we take these featuresto be analogous to a job-description, and we then set off to find outwhat in the world does that job. This, it seems, gives us a choice: wecan either identify the original property we were interested in with thethings or properties in the world which do its job, or we can identify itwith the job itself. In the case of truth, I’ve argued, the latter routeis preferable, since we need to respect the intuition that there is oneproperty shared by all and only true propositions. So far, so good.The problem comes when we characterize the second route as the viewthat truth, or whatever property we are concerned with, is a 2nd orderproperty. For doing so flies in the face of the original strategy. Thatstrategy says that the property of F is the property that has the F -ishfeatures specified in our folk theory of F . But the property of havinga property that plays the F -role doesn’t have those F -ish features. Soby adopting the 2nd order property approach, one seemingly underminesthe original thought behind the functionalist strategy.

6 Conclusion and Future Prospects

The above considerations imply that the pluralist is in the unenviableposition of having to meet two distinct and seemingly incompatible de-mands.

The first demand, suggested by the problems faced by SAP and re-ductive alethic functionalism, is that the pluralism must still respect:

Truth is One: there is a single property named by "truth"that all and only true propositions share.

Nonetheless if the pluralist is still going to be pluralist in any sense shemust maintain:

Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.

Is a view that answers both these demands possible? One reason to beoptimistic — which I can only sketch here — comes to light by consid-ering the following fact. The pluralist wishes to say that propositionscan be true in different ways. At a minimum, this suggests that truth isdependent on these different ways of being true. That is,

ST: Necessarily, for any proposition of domain D, if it istrue, then it has some property F such that, necessarily, if aproposition of D is F , it is true.


What ST proposes is that truth is a supervenient property, in that itstrongly co-varies with other properties, such as correspondence with factor superassertibility, that propositions may have. And ST is compatible,clearly, with two further thoughts: first, that truth not just co-varies withthese further properties but that it is metaphysically dependent in someway on those properties; and second, that which property determinestruth can vary across context. That is, not only:

Necessarily, if x is F , then it is T

but

It is possible that x is T without being F .

The natural thought, in short, is that truth is a single 1st order propertywhich is asymmetrically dependent on other properties. Which prop-erty? The simplest answer, overlooked above, is to fall back on ourtruisms: to be true is to have the features picked out by the truisms,whatever they are. If, for example, our folk truisms tell us that truth isobjective a norm of belief, and the property had by beliefs at the end ofinquiry, then

Being true = being objective and normative of belief and hadby beliefs at the end of inquiry.

Thus, far from being a disjunctive property, according to this suggestion,truth is a complex conjunctive property. Since it identifies truth witha single property, this thought respects commonality. But since thatproperty has multiple subvening bases, it holds out a promise that wemight be able to understand how there can be more than one way for ajudgment to be true.

Obviously this is just a sketch. What the pluralist needs is (a) a fulleraccount of the features picked out by the truisms; and (b) an account ofthe dependency relation. We’ve already seen that this second demandcan’t be unpacked by saying that truth is realized by more than oneunderlying property. As the reflections of the last section suggest, therelation between the ways of being true and truth as such would have tobe much stronger and more intimate than the relation between mentalstates and brain states.

What the pluralist needs is not realization but metaphysical determi-nation. To invoke an overtly Aristotlean way of putting the point, ratherthan thinking of truth as multiply realized in some other properties, the


pluralist should see truth as immanent in those properties. Specifyingthe nature of immanence is difficult, but at the very least, we can saythat that a property X is immanent in property Y , where Y is a mem-ber of some set of base properties B, just when necessarily, X cannot beinstantiated unless some member of B is instantiated; and to instantiateY just is, in part, to instantiate X. One type of immanent property is adeterminable property. The determinable property redness for example,is immanent in its determinates scarlet and crimson. It is a priori thatto be red one must be red in some way. And it is similarly a priori thatscarlet is one way of being red, and being red is part of what it is to bescarlet. Immanence, like identity, is therefore a metaphysically intimaterelation, but unlike identity, it is, like realization, asymmetric.

Determinables are not the only type of immanent property. Nothingbars us from holding that certain functional properties are also imma-nent6. A functional property is defined by certain features, in particularits relational features. Intuitively then, some functional property F willbe immanent in some other property Y just when it is a priori that thefeatures definitive of F are a part of the features of Y . More carefully:a given functional property F is immanent in Y when it is a priori thatthe features and relations something has in virtue of its being F are asubset of the features and relations something has in virtue of being Y .Where this is the case, we could say that being F is manifested by beingY .

Were the pluralist to see truth in this way, she would hold that aproposition is true if, and only if, it has some property Y that manifeststruth. Intuitively put, a particular relation of correspondence wouldmanifest truth were playing the truth-role — having the features pickedout by the folk theory of truth — part of what it is for a proposition tocorrespond to objects and properties in the world.

Whether these suggestions can be developed remains to be seen [seeLynch forthcoming]. Much more needs to be said. What is clear is thatshould alethic pluralism be made coherent, it must make sense of thethought that truth is neither one nor many but many and one7.

6Determinable immanent properties are distinct from manifested immanent prop-erties in at least three ways. First, determinants generally differ from one anotheralong some linear ordering. Second, determinable properties cannot determine them-selves; but the definition of manifestation allows, if it does not require, that mani-festable properties can manifest themselves. Third, determinants of a determinablemutually detest one another, to paraphrase Armstrong. That is, nothing that is scar-let at some point and time can be crimson at that same point and time. Not so witha manifestable immanent property.

7This paper was originally presented at the (Anti)Realisms Conference in Nancy,


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1968 Will to Power, W. Kaufmann (ed.); Kaufmann and Hollingdale(trans), New York: Vintage. Cited according to standard citationconvention.

Pedersen, Nikolaj

2006 What can the problem of mixed inferences teach us aboutalethic pluralism The Monist 89, 103–117.

Sher, Gila

2004 In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth, Journal of Philos-ophy, 101, 5–36.

Tappolet, Christine

1997 Mixed Inferences: A Problem for Pluralism about Truth Pred-icates, Analysis, 57, 209–210.

2000 Truth Pluralism and Many-valued Logics: A Reply to Beall,The Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 382–385.

Vision, Gerald

2004 Veritas, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wright, Cory D.

2005 On the Functionalization of Pluralist Approaches to Truth,Synthese 145, 1–28.

Wright, Crispin

1992 Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1996 Replies to Critics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research56 (4). All pages numbers refer to the version reprinted in Wright2003.

1999 Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed, Truth, S. Blackburnand K. Simmons (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 203–238.

2001 Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism in The Na-ture of Truth, M. P. Lynch (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press:751–789.

2003 Saving the Differences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Truth and Warranted Assertibility

Tommaso PiazzaSalzburg Universität

Résumé : Cet article soulève la question de savoir si le réaliste sémantiquedoit soutenir le principe selon lequel : (R) toute raison de penser qu’un énoncéest vrai est une raison de penser que l’énoncé est soutenable de manière garan-tie. A l’inverse de ce qui est proposé par W. Alston, qui dit que l’acceptationde (R) impose l’identification de l’extension du « vrai » et du « soutenable demanière garantie », l’article soutient que (R) peut être dérivé de l’hypothèseneutre entre le réalisme et l’antiréalisme selon laquelle il faut accepter touteillustration par des exemples non-pathologiques du shéma d’équivalence ES

(il est vrai que p ssi p) pour comprendre le prédicat « vrai ». En outre, l’articleargumente en faveur de la thèse selon laquelle le réaliste a des motivationspositives pour accepter (R), car ce principe est la prémisse d’un argument trèsgénéral pour la thèse que la signification d’un énoncé ne peut pas être donnéepar les conditions dans lesquelles l’énoncé est soutenable.

Abstract: The article addresses the question whether the semantic realistshould accept the principle (R) according to which every reason to think thata statement is true is a reason to think that the statement is warrantedlyassertible, and vice versa. As against W. Alston’s suggestion, according towhich the acceptance of (R) commits one to regarding “true” and “warrant-edly assertible” as having the same extension, it is argued that (R) just followsfrom the neutral assumption, also shared by Alston, that the acceptance of allnon-pathological instances of the Equivalence Schema (it is true that p iff p)provides a necessary condition for understanding the truth-predicate. So, it isargued, (R) is open both to the realist and to the antirealist. In addition, in thefinal part it is sketched a general argument against the anti-realistic identifica-tion of meaning with assertibility conditions, which is essentially premised on(R). With this it is shown that the realist has also good dialectical motivationsto accept (R).


126 Tommaso Piazza

Introduction1

The alethic debate on realism and antirealism characterizes these twopositions as ones concerning the nature of truth: the realist holds thattruth is an evidentially unconstrained property. She argues that the ex-tension of the predicate is fixed independently of what humans actuallyknow, will know and would know, were their epistemic powers and/orthe epistemic conditions an idealization of some sort of ours. The an-tirealist holds that truth is an epistemically constrained property; so sheargues that the extension of “true” coincides with that of a (complex)epistemic predicate, like “warrantedly assertible”, “warrantedly assert-ible under idealized epistemic conditions”, “incontrovertibly warrantedlyassertible”, etc.

The realist is committed to denying that

(R*) it is true that p if and only if it is warrantedly assertible that p.

(R*) asserts that “true” and “warrantedly assertible” coincide in exten-sion. The realist is committed to rejecting it because of her endorsementof a non-epistemic conception of truth, according to which the existenceof truths for which a warrant is even in principle unavailable constitutesa possibility.

Now consider the following claim:

(R) Every reason to think that a statement is true is a reason to thinkthat the statement is warrantedly assertible, and vice versa.

Apparently, (R) does not entail that “true” and “warrantedly assertible”coincide in extension. It just says that, as a matter of conceptual ne-cessity, every reason to think that a statement is true is a reason tothink that the statement is warrantedly assertible, and vice versa. Thismeans that the statements “it is warrantedly assertible that p” and “itis true that p” are cognitively equivalent ; which simply means that “it iswarrantedly assertible that p” and “it is true that p” have the same con-ditions of assertibility. So, it would seem, the realist is not committedto rejecting (R) as she is to rejecting (R*).

In A realist Conception of Truth W. Alston has claimed that endors-ing (R) presupposes endorsing (R*). Since (R*) voices a commitmentinconsistent with the realist identification of truth with a non-epistemic

1I am indebted to the following persons for very helpful comments and observationson previous versions of this paper: Sergio Bernini, Nicola Ciprotti, Michael Lynch,Teresa Marques, Luca Moretti, Marco Santambrogio, and an anonomous referee.

Truth and Warranted Assertibility 127

property, Alston has claimed that the realist must also reject (R). Ac-cording to Alston, (R) is in good standing only if one presupposes that“what ES [the Equivalence Schema, according to which every instanceof “it is true that p iff p” holds necessarily] says to be equivalent to thetruth of p is some positive epistemic status of the assertion of p” [Alston1996, 219]. If one reads (ES) in this way—Alston insists—one imme-diately gets to (R*). So, as long as the meta-linguistic reading of (ES)is required to have (R), the acceptation of (R) cannot be divorced fromthe acceptation of (R*).

As against Alston’s suggestion, I will show (i) that (R) can be derivedwithout endorsing the so-called meta-linguistic reading of (ES). Onthe contrary, I will show that (R) can be derived by uncontroversialassumptions concerning the role performed by—rather than the correctreading of—(ES). As a consequence, I will show that the realist is notprevented from accepting it. Finally, I will argue (ii) that the realisthad better accept it; for (R) can be used by the realist to put forwardan argument against the antirealist. The final part of the paper will bedevoted to outline this argument.

Cognitive Equivalence, Implicit Definition

Recall an old-fashioned piece of philosophical exemplification. There isa person, Caroline, who knows that the first planet she sees in the skyafter the sunset is Venus. She learned that the expression “the eveningstar” is a quite common label people uses to denote the planet, and, uponbeing consulted on matters of astrophysical identity, is always prone tomaintain that the evening star is indeed Venus. An unlearned friend ofCaroline, Tom, heard something about the existence of a star commonlyreferred to as the “morning star”, in virtue of the fact that it is theleast star to disappear before the sunrise. Tom asks Caroline the weirdquestion whether, because of the similarity between the two labels, theheavenly body denoted by “the evening star” and the star denoted bythe “morning star” are one and the same star (actually Tom does notknow which planet that “star” would be). Carolina, who does not knowthat the “morning star” too denotes Venus, unintendedly delivers thefalse answer that Venus is not the morning star. Though perhaps thisis not its most interesting achievement, the philosophical literature hasunanimously granted that there is nothing wrong in Caroline’s answer,nothing at least concerning her rationality (a rational agent has the right,at times, to ignore something of the world she rationally inhabits), nor

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her linguistic competence (the example works on the presupposition thatthe expression “the morning star” can be understood without masteringa full theory concerning its denotatum).

If one asked what fault could have been attributed to Caroline be-side or instead her (partial) ignorance, consider the following case (noth-ing wrong if, again, the reader’s mind is surfaced by the suspicion of aphilosophical déjà-vu). Caroline is well aware of the fact that Tom, herunlearned friend, is not married, and is used to tell her female friendsthis fact, in the hope that one might get interested in the poor Tom(normally no one does). However, one day Laura—unexpectedly drivenby her interest for Tom—asks Carolina whether Tom is still a bachelor.This could be a good occasion for Tom; unfortunately, Carolina deliversthe false answer that he is not anymore. As before, Carolina wantedto be sincere. So, if she is guilty of something, this is not to be foundin her propensity to tell the truth. However she is not ignoring thatTom is a bachelor: she knows that he is not married. What is wrong?As more than one reader might have guessed, we are faced by an al-ternative: either Carolina does not know the meaning of the expression“bachelor”, or, if she does know it, she is being logically faulty: she doesnot seem to appreciate that if S has the property A, and the propertyA = the property B, then S has the property B.

In both cases Caroline tells a falsehood. The second time, however,we have the strong intuition that more than ignorance is involved. Wedo not stay content with the supposition that she just ignores the factthat Tom is still a bachelor. What is the difference between the twocases? Why is Carolina faulty in the second case differently than inthe first case? The difference, though arguably not its most interestingexplanation, is that the statements

(1) The evening star is Venus, and

(2) The morning star is Venus,

contrary to

(3) Tom is not married, and

(4) Tom is a bachelor,

are not cognitively equivalent.

Two statements are cognitively equivalent whenever “for any contextc, nobody who fully understands them can take one of them to express


a truth with respect to c without immediately being ready to take theother to express a truth with respect to c as well”2. The idea is thatsome statements, for reasons which have to do with the meaning of theexpressions they feature, are such that no one, unless excusable for alack of semantic competence or of logical capacities, can take a differentattitude toward them: if one accepts the first, then one accepts thesecond; if one doubts the first, then one doubts the second, etc. Thesecond example pivots on the identity of meaning between “bachelor”and “unmarried man”. Since they mean one and the same thing, (3)and (4) are cognitively equivalent. No one can accept the first andreject (doubt, simply weight, etc.) the second, and vice versa, unlessfalling sort of being a competent user of both expressions (henceforth Ishall drop the second alternative concerning logical mistake, and shallmaintain that whenever two statements are cognitively equivalent, S’sfailure to take the same attitude toward both statements signals hersemantic incompetence, i.e. her inability to understand what either thefirst or the second statement says). The first case, on the contrary, differsbecause (1) and (2) are not cognitively equivalent: “the morning star”and “the evening star”, though coincide in extension, have a differentmeaning. So that a thinker who accepts the first and rejects the secondneeds not be charged of something like incompetence in the use of eitherexpression.

Identity of meaning (as it is arguably the case for “bachelor” and“unmarried man”) does not constitute a necessary condition for cogni-tive equivalence. It arguably supplies a sufficient condition for it, if therelevant statements are of the form “S is p” and “S is q” and the meaningof “p” is the same as the meaning of “q”: in such case, no one understand-ing both statements can, for instance, believe the first and disbelieve thesecond.

However, consider a biconditional B, whose left-hand side and whoseright hand-side are not of the indicated form. Suppose that B performsa definitional role of a devised form of one of the expressions, say “#”,featured either by B’s right-hand side or by B’s left-hand side. In thiscase B would be what is commonly called an implicit definition of “#”,much in the same way Hilbert thought that Euclid’s axioms are implicit

2Künne, who has recently re-called the philosophical attention to Frege’s notion ofcognitive equivalence, adds the clause concerning a fixed context in order to excludecases of equivocation. Consider the word “bank”, and the statements “there is abachelor on the bank” and “there is not an unmarried man on the bank”: there wouldbe nothing amiss, were they uttered, respectively, in the public garden and in frontof a big building down in the City, if the same person on either occasion acceptedboth. See [Künne 2003, 42].

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definitions of geometrical expressions like “point”, “line”, etc. Roughly,an implicit definition is supposed to work as follows: suppose that theexpression “#” is undefined, and that it is introduced within a languageby the stipulation that it means whatever makes true a (partially unin-terpreted) formula featuring the expression “#” among its sub-sententialconstituents. According to the theory, the acceptance of the formula astrue affects that “#” acquires the intended meaning, in that whoeverthinks that the formula is true is thereby affecting that the content theformula conveys is true, and so that “#” receive the intended meaning.Accordingly, “point”, in Hilbert’s story, means whatever makes true theaxioms which feature among their constituents that very expression.

Suppose, as more than one does, that the meaning of some expressionis successfully introduced by means of an implicit definition. Supposefurther that our B is indeed a implicit definition of “#”. If B is animplicit definition, acceptance of B constitutes a necessary conditionfor being a competent user of “#”. Since “#” means whatever makesB true, falling short of appreciating the truth of B is to fall short ofunderstanding the meaning of “#”. Now remember that B is of a bi-conditional form. So it is of the form p iff q, where “#” is either aconstituent of “p” or a constituent of “q”, no matter whose constituentit is. If it is so, failure to accept the transition from p to q and fromq to p is a failure to count as competent user of the expression “#”.Acceptance of a bi-conditional may in fact be broken down into theunconditional acceptance of the transition from its left-hand side to itsright hand, and of the transition from its right hand-side to its left-handside. So, whoever accepts p and rejects q, or accepts q and rejects p,falls short of being a competent user of “#”. Moreover, what the implicitdefinitional status of B seems to rule out is the consistency of a differencein attitude toward its left-hand side and its right-hand side, and thesupposition that this difference is not to be attributed to one’s linguisticincompetence. For every attitude φ, a different attitude ξ is ruled outby the acceptance of B, whose bi-conditional form guarantees p’s and q’scovariance in truth-value. Whoever accepts B, and takes the attitudeφ toward p is thereby committed to taking the same attitude toward q

(and vice-versa). Accordingly, if B is a biconditional, and performs thesemantic role of an implicit definition, its left-hand side and its right-hand side are cognitively equivalent : the acceptance of B constitutes anecessary condition for understanding “#”, and the acceptance of B rulesout the possibility of a difference in attitude toward B’s left-hand andright-hand sides, so that whoever takes different attitudes toward themfalls short of being competent with “#”. Which is what the cognitivelyequivalence of a pair of statements requires.


The Equivalence Schema as a (partial) im-plicit definition of “true”

Does (ES) plays an implicit definitional role along the lines of the pre-ceding section? Assessing the question whether a context “B” is to beregarded as an implicit definition of one of its constituting expressions“#” arguably requires assessing two distinct sub-questions: whether mas-tery of “#” can be credited independently of the doxastic attitude one isdisposed to take toward “B” (i.e. whether acceptation of “B” constitutesa necessary condition on the understanding of “#”), and whether masteryof “#” is entailed by the acceptation of “B” (i.e. whether acceptation of“B” constitutes a sufficient condition on the understanding of “#”).

To say that acceptation of “B” provides a necessary condition on theunderstanding of “#” is to say that every case in which one is reluctant toaccept “B” is to be regarded as a case in which one does not understand“#”. Acceptation of (ES) seems, in light of the following example, topossess this feature. Tom (again) tells Caroline an unbelievable storyconcerning his relationship with Laura: “We have been to New York forthe week-end”. Caroline is not convinced because she knows that bothTom and Laura live in Austria. So she asks Tom whether it is true thatthey have been to New York. Tom apparently weights the question, anddelivers the answer that it is not true. However, he finally adds: “but asI already told you, we have been to New York”. What should we thinkof Tom? His linguistic performance reveals that he fails to appreciatethe fact that “We have been to New York” does entail “it is true that wehave been to New York”. Differently than before, however, we are notdisposed to treat Tom’s defiance as immaterial to the question whetherhe understands the predicate “true”: he is not sensitive to the fact thatto assert is to present as true, so that his asserting that p commits himto assert that it is true that p. So, we are disposed to treat Tom as onewho fails to grasp the concept of truth. It would seem that this examplecould be easily generalised to every p. So that, it might be suggested,the acceptation of (ES) seems to provide a necessary condition for theunderstanding of the truth-predicate.

As against the foregoing suggestion, it might be argued that havingthe disposition to accept every instance of (ES) provides too strong acondition on the understanding of “it is true”. After all, it might besuggested, no rational thinker can be disposed to accept the transitionfrom “what I now say by uttering this sentence is false” to “it is truethat what I now say by uttering this sentence is false”. Such transition

132 Tommaso Piazza

would entail the utterance of a paradoxical claim, which never seems tobe possibly true. If what I say is true — that is to say if I what I now sayby uttering the first sentence is false — then what I say when utteringit is false. If false, however, than what I say is true.

This rejoinder can seemingly be dealt with by imposing the con-straint that it is the disposition to accept all non-pathological instancesof (ES) that constitutes a necessary condition on the understanding ofthe truth predicate. However, once such constraint is in place, it seemsthat understanding the truth predicate requires having the dispositionto recognise as such all pathological instances of (ES). Can the latterobservation be made compatible with the claim that the qualified accep-tation of (ES) provides a necessary condition on the understanding ofthe truth predicate?

A negative answer is plausibly enforced by the observation that if oneis in a position to comply to the qualified condition, one must already bein possession of the concept of truth (as constituted by the acceptation ofthe claim that if a statement is true, then it is not false). If one reads the“already” in a logical manner, then the possession of the concept of truthmust be constituted much independently of the qualified disposition toaccepting every non-pathological instance of (ES). Accordingly, the ac-ceptation of every non-pathological instance of (ES) cannot constitutea necessary condition for understanding the truth-predicate.

However, it might be suggested that the concept of truth has an holis-tic nature, such that its possession is constituted by several conditions,of which the condition that if something is true, then it is not false, andthe condition that every non-pathological instance of (ES) hold goodconstitutes just two different instances. Were it so, possession of theconcept of truth would be constituted by the joint acceptation of all thebasic conditions.

What about the sufficiency condition? If we allow for the holisticnature of the truth concept — i.e. if we allow the acceptation of morethan one principle to constitute the possession of the truth-concept — ithardly constitutes a possibility that one of those principles, besides pro-viding a necessary condition, also provides a sufficient one for possessingthe truth concept. For if a condition for possessing a concept is both nec-essary and sufficient, then meeting the condition is all that is required topossess the concept. Accordingly, if we salvage the contention that theacceptation (ES) provides a necessary condition for understanding thetruth predicate by constraining the range of the instances one is to bedisposed to accept just to its non-pathological instances, then it must beat the cost of denying that acceptation of (ES) also provides a sufficient


condition for the possession of the truth concept.

Does this result impede the characterisation of (ES) as an implicitdefinition of the predicate “it is true that”? According to the foregoingprovisos, this question deserves an affirmative answer. Acceptation of(ES) does in fact not provide a necessary and sufficient condition for un-derstanding the truth predicate. However, it resulted from the foregoingconsiderations that the qualified acceptation of (ES) does indeed pro-vide a necessary condition. If we allow that a context partly constitutesthe understanding of an expression if accepting the context constitutes anecessary condition for understanding it, we can then propose to regard(ES) as a partial implicit definition of the truth predicate.

Nothing significant happens concerning the relation between the no-tion of implicit definition and that of cognitive equivalence if partialimplicit definitions are allowed as legitimate implicit definitions of anexpression. It remains true that if a (partial or non-partial) implicitdefinition has a biconditional form, its left-hand side and its right-handside are cognitively equivalent.

Let us illustrate the point by concentrating on the case most inter-esting for us, that is to say on (ES). Along with the foregoing con-siderations, suppose that the acceptation of every (non pathological in-stance) of (ES) constitutes a necessary (though non-sufficient) conditionof the possession of the concept of truth. That the qualified acceptationof (ES) constitutes a necessary condition to possess the truth conceptguarantees that whoever falls short of the disposition to accept all (non-pathological) instances of (ES) does not possess the concept of truth.Accordingly, for any arbitrary p that does not give rise to a pathologicalinstance of (ES), acceptation of “p” and rejection of “it is true that p” isnot consistent with the possession of the concept of truth. Conversely,whoever possesses the concepts necessary to grasp both what “p” saysand what “it is true that p” says cannot but be disposed to take the verysame propositional attitude towards both statements. For if she has theconcepts to understand both “p” and “it is true that p”, a fortiori shepossesses the concept of truth, and the possession of concept of truth, solong as it is also constrained by the qualified acceptation of the covari-ance in truth value of “p” and “it is true that p” encapsulated by (ES),guarantees the necessary convergence of propositional attitudes.

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Alston’s Commitment

In Alston’s own terminology, the Equivalence Schema is referred to as theT -schema. Accordingly, every statement that derives from the uniformsubstitution of “p” with a declarative sentence, is, in Alston’s terminol-ogy, a T -statement. Does Alston attribute to the acceptation of everyT -statement the role of constituting the understanding of the truth-predicate? This would be equivalent to attributing a constitutive roleto the acceptation of (ES). Given the result of the preceding section,an affirmative answer to this question would then show that Alston iscommitted to the claim that ‘p” and “it is true that p” are cognitivelyequivalent.

The following quotation from A Realist Conception of Truth seem-ingly provides promising evidence as to Alston’s endorsement of the im-plicit definitional role of (ES):

The suggestion is that if we understand that any T-statement is con-ceptually, analytically true, true by virtue of the meaning of the termsinvolved, in particular the term ’true’, then we thereby understand whatit is for a proposition to be true. [Alston 1996, 27]

However, there is one difficulty in construing Alston as endorsing theconception that (ES) implicitly defines “true”. The problem is that Al-ston seemingly requires one to appreciate that every T-statement (everyinstance of (ES)) is conceptually true for her to understand the predi-cate “true”. However, the attribution of an implicit definitional role to(ES) just requires a thinker to accept every instance thereof, much in-dependently of the recognition that every such instance is conceptually,not to say analytically true.

More than this, Alston is quite explicit in declaring that the T -schemais not a definition, not even a contextual definition, of “true”. The reasonis that, unlike in a proper definition, the right-hand side and the left-hand side of (ES) are not synonymous.

The meaning of “The proposition that lemons are sour is true” cannotbe the same as that of “Lemons are sour”. The former has conceptualcontent absent from the latter. One could understand “Lemons are sour”perfectly well without having any concept of truth whatever. [Alston1996, 34]

Two considerations are in order. The first one concerns the role Al-ston attributes to (ES). If my reading of the foregoing quotation iscorrect, Alston is implausibly making the capability to understand thetruth-predicate depend on the capability of entertaining propositional


attitudes of the form “it is conceptually true that —” and “it is analyti-cally true that —”. The implausibility stems from the fact that Alston’saccount of the way the understanding of the truth-predicate can be im-parted circularly requires, on the part of those who still lack the linguisticresources to understand it, the capability of entertaining complex atti-tudes toward — and therefore of understanding — contents featuring thevery concept expressed by the predicate. Where the understanding of“true” to depend on the satisfaction of Alston’s condition, no one couldunderstand that predicate.

Second observation: both the claim that the truth-predicate “is theonly predicate such that, when one appreciates that the statement gen-erated by that insertion [within the schema: for any p, p is iff p] isconceptually true, one is thereby in possession of the concept expressedby that predicate” [Alston 1996, 54], and the claim that (ES)’s left-handside and right-hand side are not synonymous, are consistent with the cog-nitive equivalence of the left-hand side and right-hand side of (ES).

As to the first contention, consider, as Alston seemingly suggests,that S is able to understand every statement of the form “it is true thatp”, only if S understand that every instance of (ES) is conceptually,analytically true. If it is so, for every S possessing that capability, wemight derive the consequence that S knows, for every p, that if it is truethat p, then p, and that if p, then it is true that p. Knowledge thatevery instance of (ES) is conceptually, analytically true certainly entailsknowledge that the transition from its left-hand side to its right-handside, and vice versa, holds good.

As to the second contention, if “p” and “it is true that p” are notsynonymous, then one being in a position to understand “p” can plainlybe in a position not to understand that “it is true that p”. For in additionto possessing the conceptual resources necessary to understand that p,she also has to possess the conceptual resources necessary to understandthat is true that . However, once it is granted that, for some S, S doespossess both kinds of conceptual resources, and once it is granted thatthe conceptual resources necessary to understand the truth predicate areacquired in the indicated way, it follows that “p” and “it is true that p”are cognitive equivalent. No one understanding both of them can takeone of them to express a truth (a falsehood, or whatever) without atthe same time being ready to take the other one to express a truth (afalsehood, whatever) as well.

I conclude this section by maintaining that Alston’s stance toward(ES) does indeed commit him to the view that “p” and “it is true thatp” are cognitively equivalent. Therefore, the following argument, tak-

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ing as its first premise the claim that both statements are cognitivelyequivalent, is acceptable by Alston’s own lights.

Vindicating (R)

To say that “p” and “it is true that p” are cognitively equivalent is to saythat

(i) R is a reason to believe that p iff R is a reason to believe that it istrue that p.

The cognitive equivalence thesis ensures that no consideration possiblyenjoins acceptance of p unless it also enjoins acceptance that it is truethat p, and vice versa. Existed an R whose substitution within (i) gaverise to a false statement, there would be circumstances under which athinker fully understanding both sides of (ES) would be rationally re-quired (permitted) to take different propositional attitudes toward them;which is inconsistent with the statements’ cognitive equivalence.

Now consider the following premise:

(ii) R is a reason to believe that p iff R is a reason to assert that p.

(ii) should be taken to be a definitional truth. With this I mean that (ii)just codifies the purely epistemic sense in which the notion of “reason foran assertion” is referred to within the debate over semantic realism andanti-realism3.

By substituting (i)’s left-hand side with (ii)’s right-hand side we yield

3(ii), as a consequence, excludes as reasons for an assertion prudential considera-tions, or motivational considerations. If I think of someone that she is very impolite,and I attach much value to politeness, I may find my self with strong reasons to be-lieve that she is impolite (imagine I saw her many times being impolite with someoneelse, and that some trustworthy witness told me the same), but with no (motiva-tional) reasons to assert it. Did I say to this person that she is impolite, I mightrun the risk of being impolite in turn, and I am not willing to be so. This does notchange that when I have reasons to believe that she is unpolite the assertion thatshe is would be justified under the relevant respect. Wright emphasized the samepoint where, by commenting on Putnam’s Deweyan use of the label “warranted as-sertibility” instead of that of “rational acceptability”, he says: “Naturally, there canbe conversational or social reasons why a belief which one is warranted in holding hadbetter not be expressed in a particular context. But if we are concerned only withepistemic justification, then each of one’s warranted beliefs corresponds to a justifiedpossible assertion and vice versa”, [Wright 1987, 37]. Wright also writes: “we maytake it that this [i.e., rational acceptability] is the notion which is now standardlycalled assertibility”, [Wright 2000, 337].


(iii) R is a reason to assert that p iff R is a reason to believe that it istrue that p.

If every reason to assert is a reason to believe, and vice versa, and everyreason to believe in a proposition is a reason to believe that the proposi-tion is true, and vice versa, then every reason to assert a proposition isa reason to believe it true, and vice versa, that is to say (iii). As a lastpremise consider now the following one:

(iv) R is a reason to assert that p iff R is a reason to believe that it iswarrantedly assertible that p

(iv) too holds true on conceptual grounds. It just spells out the iterativenature of the reasons for an assertion. If one has a reason to assert aproposition, then one has a reason to believe (assert) that the propositionis assertible. Conversely, if one has a reason to believe (assert) that agiven proposition is assertible, then one has a reason to belie (assert)the proposition4,5. It suffices to substitute (iv)’s right-hand side for the

4(iv) involves no commitment as to the contents a thinker must be prepared toaccept if she is to count as a rational epistemic agent. The case of a lay-man L wholacks the concept of warranted assertion but still shows in his linguistic practice, formost of the p expressible in her language, the ability to tell apart the circumstanceswhich are germane to the assertion of p constitutes no counterexample to (iv). ForL would falsify the left-to-right transition of a slightly modified principle, accordingto which (iv*) S has a reason to assert that p iff S believes that it is warrantedlyassertible that p. The L under consideration has possibly reasons to assert that p,yet it is arguable that L cannot meet the right-hand side condition stated by theprinciple; for she lacks the relevant conceptual repertoire. So (iv*) is arguably false.Contrary to (iv*), however, (iv) does not impose any condition on what a thinkermust (be in a position to) believe of a proposition in order to (be in a position to) havea reason to assert it; it just signals that whatever counts as a reason to assert thatp automatically turns into a reason to believe that it is warrantedly assertible that p

(much independently of the fact that any thinker who is able to appreciate reasonsto assert that p actually believes or possesses the concepts necessary to believe thatit is warrantedly assertible that p whenever it is the case).

5It must also be noted that “reason” and “warrant” are not used in this contextas synonymous. This can be appreciated by considering cases in which R countsas a reason to accept that p, at the same time failing to warrant the belief (or theassertion) that p. To generate such cases it suffices to consider bad reasons. It mightthen be argued that “reason” is to be contrasted with “warrant” in that the formercharacterises the subjective epistemic property of taking oneself to have a warrant,and the latter the objective epistemic property just referred to within the scope of theintensional operator. I do not think that this characterisation impugns the status of(iv). As before, to differentiate reasons from warrants along the subjective-objectiveaxis is problematic only if one accepts a different principle, (iv**), according to whichR is a reason to assert that p only if R warrants the assertion of p. The originalprinciple just exploits the following conceptual link between subjective and objectivereason: if one has a (subjective) reason to assert that p, one takes oneself to have a(nobjective) warrant to assert it, and vice versa.

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left-hand side of (iii) to yield

(iv) R is a reason to believe that it is warrantedly assertible that p iffR is a reason to believe that that it is true that p,

which is the very condition (R)6.

Conclusion 1

In the light of the foregoing argument, it should be clear that acceptanceof (R) does not presuppose the acceptance of the meta-linguistic readingof (ES). So, also if one accepts Alston’s claim that such reading isfalse, acceptance of (R) is not inconsistent with the acceptance of (ES)(in its correct reading). For (R) derives from the further principle (i)that is consequent upon the supposition — arguably shared by Alston— that acceptation of (ES) is indeed necessary to grasp the conceptof truth. Contrary to Alston’s suggestion, then, (R) does not beg therealist’s question. Its acceptation does not depend on the further claim,

6In his recent Conceptions of Truth Wolfgang Künne offers a new version of Fitch’sargument against every form of alethic antirealism: it is based on considering as acandidate for truth the following pair of sentences: Σ0 “The number of my hairs is oddand nobody can be justified in believing that it is odd”, and Σ1 “the number of myhairs is even and nobody can be justified in believing that it is even”. His argumentshows that the joint assumption of the truth of Σ0 (respectively of Σ1) and of therational acceptability of Σ0 (respectively of Σ1) leads to a contradiction. Since eitherΣ0 or Σ1 is true, one of them constitutes the premise of a reductio ad absurdum of theidea that every truth must be in principle rationally acceptable. I mention this resultjust to dispel the impression that it enjoins any kind of consequence for (1*). Theimpression to the contrary might arise as a consequence of the correct observationthat sentences like Σ0 or Σ1 are such that any belief in their truth is inconsistentwith any belief to the effect that their assertion would be warranted. They constitutea clear counterexample to (1*) — one might wish to conclude — in that it is alsoclearly the case that having any reason to believe in the truth of either Σ0 or Σ1 doesnot imply having any reason to believe that either Σ0 or Σ1 is warrantedly assertible.For the latter belief is inconsistent with the former. The reason I take sentences likeΣ0 or Σ1 to be neutral with respect to (1*) is however that they are built in a waythat no belief to the effect that they are true, nor any belief to the effect that they arewarrantedly assertible can ever be as much as justified. So that neither the transitionfrom-left-to-right nor the transition from-right-to-left of (1*) — when either Σ0 orΣ1 is substituted for p — can ever be falsified: as a matter of conceptual necessity,both transitions can never deploy a truth to be preserved in the first place. Künnehimself, in a different context, observes that “a biconditional is false (as understoodin classical logic) if one of its branches is true and the other false”; and in (1*), wheneither Σ0 or Σ1 is substituted for p, “such a divergence in truth value cannot arise”,[Künne 2003, 188].


unacceptable to the realist, that “it is true that p” and “it is warrantedlyassertible that p” are extensionally equivalent.

Before concluding, I would like to stress an important respect underwhich the realist should welcome this result. The next section is infact devoted at outlining a very general argument against the semanticanti-realist, taking as its main premise (R).

(R) and Meaning Antirealism

As it is commonly suggested, “the essence of an anti-realist conceptionof meaning [is] given by the thesis that a sentence’s meaning or con-tent is given in terms of its assertion conditions” [Skorupski 1993, 133].Such conception straightforwardly derives from the antirealist identifi-cation of truth with an epistemic notion: understanding meaning is infact held both by the realist and by the antirealist to consist in graspof truth-conditions; if, along with the antirealist, truth is (some kindof) assertibility, then understanding meaning is to grasp conditions ofassertibility. Let us state the antirealist claim in the following form:

(a) Meaning is assertibility conditions.

If meaning is assertibility conditions, then two sentences having the sameassertibility conditions have the same meaning. Now (R) says that if R isa reason to assert that it is true that p, then R is a reason to assert thatit is warrantedly assertible that p. This claim can be put equivalentlyas a claim to the effect that “it is true that p” and “it is warrantedlyassertible that p” have the same assertibility conditions. In fact, (R)guarantees that every reason in the light of which “it is true that p” isassertible is a reason in the light of which “it is warrantedly assertiblethat p” is assertible, and vice versa.

So, acceptation of (a) commits the antirealist to accept that

(b) “it is true that p” and “it is warrantedly assertible that p” have thesame meaning.

Now consider a given p which, under an available body of informationE, is still undecided (where agnosticism is the right epistemic attitudetoward p). In this case, it is both assertible that it is not the case that itis assertible that p and it is not the case that it is assertible that ¬p. If itis assertible that it is not the case that it is assertible that ¬p, then it isnot assertible that ¬p is true. The antirealist is in fact committed to the

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claim that ¬p’s truth consists in (some form of) warranted assertibilityenjoyed by ¬p. Accordingly, when p is undecided it can be assertiblethat it is not the case that it is assertible that p, and at the same time itcan fail to be assertible that it is not the case that p is true (equivalently,that ¬p is true). So,

(c) “it is not the case that it true that p” and “it is not the case thatit is warrantedly assertible that p” have not the same assertibilityconditions, hence they do not have the same meaning

(b) and (c) are actually inconsistent with

(d) The meaning of a complex sentence is a function of the meaningsof its constituents.

The statements mentioned in (c) result form embedding the statementsmentioned in (b) with the phrase “it is not the case that”. According to(b), the constituent statements have the same meaning. Therefore, (d)entails that also the complex statements they constitute should have thesame meaning7.

Conclusion 2

If the first conclusion is sound, then the antirealist is committed to ac-cepting premise (b) of the foregoing argument. Accordingly, the onlyoptions available to her seem to reduce either to reject, along with (d),the compositionality of meaning, or to reject the very premise (a), voic-ing her essential commitment to an epistemic conception of meaning.This is not the right place to press the intuitive point that the latteralternative does not look as much as available to the antirealist. Thecompositionality of meaning doesn’t seem to be a negotiable belief: itsrejection in fact threatens to make language learning an impossible task.The main conclusion I want to draw is rather the following: so long asthe foregoing argument is intuitively appealing, it apparently forces theantirealist to recede from her commitment to the epistemic nature ofmeaning. Since the argument essentially features premise (R), its veryexistence constitutes good reason, in contraposition with the worriesvoiced by Alston, for the realist to accept it.

7The argument, in its essential lines, is already sketched in [Skorupski 1993].


References

Alston, William P. 1996 A Realist Conception of Truth, Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press.

Horwich, Paul

1998 Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Künne, Wolfgang

2003 Conceptions of Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Skorupski, John

1993 Anti-Realism, Inference, and the Logical Constants, in J. Hal-dane & C. Wright (eds.), Reality, Representation, and Projection,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 133–164.

Wright, Crispin

1987 Realism, Meaning, and Truth, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell,1993.

1992 Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UniversityPress.

2000 Truth as Sort of Epistemic: Putnam’s Peregrinations, Journalof Philosophy, 97, 335–364.

142

Mind-Dependence, Irrealism andSuperassertibility

Daniel LaurierUniversité de Montréal

Résumé : Dans la section 1, j’explique pourquoi une conception Dummet-tienne du réalisme n’a de pertinence que dans certains cas particuliers. Dans lasection 2, j’indique qu’il est raisonnable de penser que Crispin Wright soutientque la vérité de certains jugements dépend de notre capacité de la connaître(si et) seulement si leur vérité consiste dans le fait qu’ils sont superassertables.Dans la section 3, je souligne qu’insister, avec Dummett et Wright, sur laconnaissabilité, nous empêche de voir qu’il y a d’autres formes légitimes deréalisme. Je propose une réfutation de la thèse attribuée à Wright dans lasection 2, ce qui m’amène à suggérer que c’est une erreur de penser que laquestion du réalisme concerne essentiellement la nature de la vérité.

Abstract: In section 1, I explain why a specifically Dummettian conceptionof realism will be relevant only in a restricted range of cases. In section 2, Isuggest that Crispin Wright could be read as holding that the truth of certainjudgements depends on our capacity to know it (if and) only if their beingtrue consists in their being superassertible. In section 3, I point out thatinsisting on knowability, as both Dummett and Wright do, prevents one fromseeing that their are other legitimate forms of realism. I argue against theclaim attributed to Wright in section 2, which leads me to suggest that it isa mistake to construe the realism debates as being essentially concerned withthe nature of truth.

The purpose of this paper is to explain and criticize a conception ofrealism which is suggested by the general approach to the realism debateswhich Crispin Wright has developed, mainly in his Truth and Objectivity[Wright 1992]. This book largely contributed to restructuring the wholeproblematic of realism, along what might be called post-Dummettianlines, inasmuch as it remains in keeping with the idea that the questionwhether truth must be seen as epistemic in nature should be at the heartof the controversies. The main thrust of the discussion will be to cast


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doubt on this idea (and by the same token, to show that a certain primafacie plausible way of understanding Wright’s approach would turn itinto an unacceptable view and is thus likely to be wrong). But first, Ipropose what I take to be fairly standard characterizations of the mainsorts of realism/irrealism.

1 Standard vs Dummettian Realism

So, let’s start with the nearly trivial observation that one may be a realisteither about things (in the widest sense, including properties) of certainkinds, or about facts of certain kinds (or both). The realist about thingsof a certain kind will typically claim (i) that there are things of thiskind and (ii) that all (or perhaps, some) of them exist independently ofourselves. The realist about facts of a certain kind will typically claim(i) that there are states-of-affairs of this kind, (ii) that some of themobtain and (iii) that all (or perhaps, some) of those which obtain doso independently of ourselves. Alternatively, Thing-realism could alsobe expressed, in the semantic mode, by saying that some terms of somecorresponding kind are such that they denote or apply to existing things,all (or some) of which exist independently of ourselves. Likewise, Fact-realism could be expressed by saying that some judgements of a certaincorresponding kind represent obtaining states-of affairs, all (or some)of which obtain independently of ourselves. This, in turn, could berephrased as the claim that some judgements of the given kind are true,and all (or some) of them are true independently of ourselves.

This suggests that any form of Thing-realism is a conjunction of twoclaims: an existence-claim and an independence-claim, while any formof Fact-realism is a conjunction of three claims: an existence claim, anactuality claim and an independence claim. Accordingly, there are twoways to oppose any Thing-realist claim, and three ways to oppose anyfact-realist claim. That is to say, one can oppose realism about factsof kind K, not only by denying either that any state-of-affairs of kindK do obtain, or that the obtaining states-of-affairs of this kind obtainindependently ourselves, but also by denying that there is any state-of-affairs of kind K at all. Likewise, one can oppose realism with-respect-tojudgements of kind K∗, not only by denying either that there is any truejudgement of this kind, or that the true judgements of this kind aretrue independently of ourselves, but also by denying that there is anyjudgement of kind K∗ at all.

It seems however to be a fairly common practice, in Dummettian cir-cles, to understand realism with-respect-to judgements of a certain kindK∗ (what is often called realism about a certain region of discourse) to

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be the claim that (some or) all judgements of this kind have a deter-minate truth-value “independently of ourselves”, or are such that theirbeing either true or false is “independent of ourselves” (in some relevantsense of this phrase, to be discussed later). Somewhat more perspicu-ously, this can be rephrased as the claim that (some or) all judgements ofkind K∗ are such that if they are true, then they are true independentlyof ourselves and if they are false, then they are false independently ofourselves. Even though this has just been (and is usually) put in the“semantic mode”, it should be obvious that the same sort of view couldhave been expressed in the material mode, by saying that (some or) allstates-of-affairs of a certain kind K are such that their obtaining or fail-ing to obtain is independent of ourselves (i.e., such that if they obtain,then it is independent of ourselves that they do and if they fail to obtain,then it is independent of ourselves that they do).

From what I take to be a standard perspective, this looks like avery peculiar way of characterizing realism/irrealism. Such a claim isobviously weaker, in one respect, than what I have described as Fact-realism, since it doesn’t entail the truth (or falsity) of any judgementof the relevant kind (i.e., it doesn’t include an actuality claim). But itis stronger in another respect, since it entails that certain judgementscan be false only if they are false independently of ourselves, and in theform in which it was introduced, Fact-realism doesn’t say anything aboutbeing false (or failing to obtain).

But now suppose that negation is understood in such a way that thenegation of a judgement is true if and only if this judgement is false(not true). Then it would seem that if any judgement is true indepen-dently of ourselves, then its negation will have to be false independentlyof ourselves, and conversely. Thus, if the kind of judgements under con-sideration is closed under negation (and negation is construed in thisstandard way) then all judgements of this kind will be such that if theyare true, then they are true independently of ourselves, if and only ifthey are such that if they are false, then they are false independentlyof ourselves. In other words, (on these assumptions) the claim that alljudgements of kind K∗ are such that if they are true, then they are trueindependently of ourselves and if they are false, then they are false inde-pendently of ourselves will boil down to the claim that all judgements ofkind K∗ are such that if they are true, then they are true independentlyof ourselves. It will then turn out to be strictly weaker than what I haveidentified as realism with-respect-to judgements of kind K∗. For the lat-ter is the claim that there are true judgements of kind K∗ and all of themare true independently of ourselves, which entails that if any judgement

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of kind K∗ is true, then it is true independently of ourselves. Thus, (onthe assumptions mentioned above) the sort of realist thesis singled outby Dummett and Co. turns out to be nothing but a restricted form ofFact-realism, one which dispenses with the actuality claim to keep onlythe existence and independence claims.

However, things are less straightforward when the relevant kind ofjudgements is not closed under negation, or negation fails to satisfy thecondition that the negation of a judgement is true if and only if thisjudgement is false (not true). In that case, the sort of realist thesisDummett seems to have in mind introduces something new, namely theclaim that certain judgements are such that if they are false, then theyare false independently of ourselves. There will then be cases where aDummettian style realist thesis will have to be expressed by saying thatall (or some) judgements of a certain kind K∗ are such that if they aretrue, then they are true independently of ourselves and if they are false,then they are false independently of ourselves.

The corresponding Independence-irrealist (as I call the irrealist whowants to oppose the realist’s Independence-claim) will then hold thatnot all (or none of) the judgements of the given kind are such that theyare true independently of ourselves if true, and false independently ofourselves if false, and there are obviously many different ways in whichthis could turn out to be true. For example, it could be true becausenot all (or no) true judgements of this kind are true independently ofourselves, or because not all (or no) false judgements of this kind are falseindependently of ourselves, or because some combination of these claimsis true. I must confess, however, that I’ve never seen an irrealist tryingto make his/her case by arguing that no false judgement of a certainkind is false independently of ourselves. The important thing is thatit will always be sufficient, in order to establish a Fact-irrealist thesisas against some corresponding Fact-realist thesis (whether or not of theDummettian variety), to show that all (or some) of the true judgements(obtaining states-of-affairs) of the relevant kind are not true (do notobtain) independently of ourselves. Indeed, it seems to be both the mostnatural strategy, and the most likely to be favored by the Independence-irrealist. Moreover, it must be kept in mind that it is only in a fairlyrestricted range of cases that the Dummettian approach would seem tohave any chance of being of special relevance.

When the realist claims that something exists/obtains independentlyof ourselves, he/she (most often) means to be saying that it exists/obtainsindependently of the fact that we have some specific mental feature orpower M (with respect to the thing in question). As far as I can see(and historically, at least), there are three main candidates for playing


the part of the designated mental feature M : (i) our capacity to know,(ii) our capacity to think or conceive and (iii) our capacity to perceiveor experience.

I have just pointed out that one special feature of a Dummett-style re-alist thesis is that it doesn’t include any actuality claim and is restrictedto an existence claim and a pair of independence claims. Another isthat Dummett and his followers have a fairly definite idea of what it is,in such contexts, to be “independent of ourselves”, according to whichfor something to be independent of ourselves is for it to be independentof our having the capacity to know it. More precisely, since Dummettis essentially concerned with Fact-realism, the guiding idea is that thetruth or falsity of a judgement is independent of ourselves when it isindependent of our having the capacity to know it1.

One consequence of reading the independence claim as a claim thatsomething is independent of our having a certain mental feature M (inthis instance, a capacity to know), is that such a claim can be true eitherbecause we don’t have any such mental feature, or because we have itand the thing in question is independent of our having it. This meansthat, just as the irrealist has the option of opposing the realist by re-jecting his/her actuality claim, the realist has the option of opposingthe Independence-irrealist by rejecting his/her commitment to our hav-

1Putting it in this way may reveal an asymmetry between truth and falsity. Theclaim that the truth of the judgement that P is independent of our having the capacityto know it could be understood either as saying that it is independent of our havingthe capacity to know that P , or as saying that it is independent of our having thecapacity to know that it is true. On the other hand, the claim that the falsity ofthe judgement that P is independent of our having the capacity to know it could beunderstood as saying that it is independent of our having the capacity to know thatit is false (not true), but obviously not as saying that it is independent of our havingthe capacity to know that P . It could however, be construed as saying that it isindependent of our having the capacity to know that not-P, on the assumption thata judgement is false if and only if its negation is true. This doesn’t, in itself, requiresthat the judgement that not-P itself belongs to the kind under consideration, butit would seem hard to deny that one cannot have the capacity to know that not-Pwithout having the capacity to know that the judgement that not-P is true (assumingone possesses the concept of truth).

The upshot seems to be that only in cases where the falsity of a judgement isequated with the truth of its negation, could the Dummettian realist conceive of thecapacity to know that something is false as being essentially the same as the capacityto know that something (else) is true. I will here be assuming that we are dealingwith such cases, and thus that the Dummettian realist claim can be expressed bysaying that (some or) all judgements of kind K* are such that if they are true, thenthey are true independently of our having the capacity to know them and if theyare false, then they are false independently of our having the capacity to know theirnegation.

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ing the relevant mental feature. Now, this is exactly the kind of realistposition that Dummett has had a tendency to present as the only pos-sible (or interesting) form of realism. For he often writes (at least inhis early papers) as if the realist was the one who holds that certainjudgements have a determinate truth-value, despite the fact that we are“in principle” unable to determine which. This is the case where, to usethe celebrated formula, it is held that truth “transcends our capacitiesof recognition”. But as Wright was one of the first to observe, and asshould be clear from what we have been saying, there are many areasof discourse for which one might be inclined to grant that truth doesn’ttranscend our capacities of recognition, while still wanting to interpretthem in a realist way (moral and “comic” discourses are Wright’s stockexamples), i.e., while still wanting to hold that the truth of the rele-vant judgements is independent our having the capacity to know them.Much of Wright’s efforts can be seen as an attempt to make room forrealist/irrealist disputes in cases where it is agreed on both sides thatwe do have the capacity to know the judgements under consideration (ortheir negation).

2 Some Central Features of Wright’sApproach

According to Wright’s approach, any predicate which satisfies, within acertain area of discourse, certain familiar platitudes such as the disquo-tational schema (“p” is T if and only if p) thereby counts as a truth-predicate for judgements of the relevant kind, or more accurately, itcounts as a predicate whose extension coincide with that of the truth-predicate, for the given area of discourse. Wright holds further thatthere is, for each area of assertive (or truth-apt) discourse, at least onepredicate which satisfies the relevant platitudes and thus works as atruth-predicate (in this area of discourse).

On his view, if a given area of discourse includes only decidable judge-ments (i.e., judgements whose truth-value we are in principle capable ofrecognizing2) then the truth-predicate for this area will be coextensivewith what he calls the predicate of “superassertibility” (for this area).One could give a rough explanation of this rather controversial and am-biguous notion by saying that a judgement is superassertible if and only if

2These are, in other words, the areas of discourse satisfying the knowability prin-ciple, according to which p if and only if it is possible (for us) to know that p.


there is a state of information which would justify it, and some justifica-tion for it would survive any improvement on this state of information3.I will fortunately have no need to scrutinize this notion in any detailhere; the only thing that matters for my purpose, is that this is an epis-temic notion (which corresponds more or less closely to the notion ofundefeasible justifiability) which, according to Wright, has the poten-tial for playing the role of a truth-predicate, in any area of discoursefor which truth doesn’t transcend our capacities of recognition. It goeswithout saying that this also is a controversial claim, but I’m not goingto discuss it either4. On the contrary, I will be assuming that there is atleast one epistemic notion which actually has the potential for satisfyingthe relevant platitudes in certain areas of discourse, and pretend thatthis is the notion of superassertibility.

What Wright calls his “minimalism” about truth, is the claim that anypredicate satisfying the relevant platitudes in a certain area of discourseis coextensive with the truth-predicate for this area of discourse, andtherefore is a candidate for expressing what the truth of a judgementof the relevant kind consists in, or amounts to. The view is, in effect,that while the concept of truth is unique and applies accross the boardover all areas of discourse, what truth consists in, the nature of truth,may vary from one area to another, giving rise to what he calls his“pluralism” about truth. What matters here, is that since an epistemicnotion of truth cannot be coextensive with a transcendent notion of truth(as Wright himself argues), if it turns out that there is even a single areaof discourse for which truth transcends our capacities of recognition,then it will have been shown not only that global weak realism is true(i.e., that the truth-value of at least some judgement is independent ofour having the capacity to know it), but also that (contrary to whatWright sometimes suggests) the notion of superassertibility is not to beconfused with that of “minimal truth” (or with what he sometimes callsthe “minimal” notion of truth).

That the truth-value of judgements of a certain kind transcends ourcapacities of recognition thus is a sufficient condition for their being true(or false) independently of our having the capacity to know them (ortheir negation), and hence, to vindicate realism with-respect-to judge-ments of this kind. But (as I have already said) one of Wright’s mostimportant contribution was to observe that this isn’t a necessary con-dition. This is to say that, even when it has been shown that the true

3This notion looms large in Wright’s works. As far as I know, it was first intro-duced in [Wright 1987a]; it is further discussed in [Wright 1992, 48–61, and 66–70].

4See [Kvanvig 1999] for a penetrating criticism of this claim.

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judgements in a certain area are exactly the superassertible ones, thequestion can still arise, whether these judgements’ being true consistsin their being superassertible, or in something else. The obvious andnatural suggestion being that if it does, then their truth depends on ourcapacity to know it and they have to be construed in an irrealist man-ner, and that if it doesn’t (if their being true consists in anything otherthan superassertibility), then their truth is independent of our capacityto know it (even though we do have this capacity) and they must accord-ingly be construed in a realist manner. Since it is precisely (the secondhalf of) this suggestion that I will be arguing against, it seems fair to addthat it is not absolutely beyond doubt that Wright is actually committedto it, though as far as I can see, the views put forward in [Wright 1992],are at least consistent with this interpretation. My reason for focusingon this suggestion (apart from the fact that I do think it is a plausibleinterpretation of Wright’s view) is that explaining why it could not besustained will help to dispel the impression that the realism/irrealismdebates essentially have to do with the nature of truth.

Wright’s official position seems to be that since (in his view) oneknows a priori that for any area of discourse, the corresponding su-perassertibility predicate could be defined, it is the realist who has theburden of showing, for any given area of discourse, that being true is not(in this area) to be identified with being superassertible. To establish herdoctrine, the realist may either try to show that, in the given area of dis-course, truth transcends our capacities of recognition, or grant that thejudgements in this area are true if and only if they are superassertible,and argue that they nonetheless satisfy further conditions which entailthat being true, in this area, doesn’t consist in being superassertible. Onthe interpretation I want to consider, this, in turn, is held to entail thatthe truth of these judgements doesn’t depend on our having the capacityto know them.

The second half of [Wright 1992] precisely aims at identifying whatthese further conditions might be. Several such conditions are pro-pounded, but they need not be mentioned here, since the only pointthat matters is that they are not meant to provide alternative charac-terizations of what realism consists in5. On the view I am considering,they should be seen only as necessary or sufficient conditions for it to bethe case that the truth of judgements of certain kinds doesn’t consist in

5It is quite clear from [Wright 1992, 147–148], for example, that what Wright calls“cognitive command” cannot be seen as providing an alternative characterization ofrealism, since it is explicitly introduced as a necessary but not sufficient condition forrealism about a given area of discourse.


their being superassertible.

This is admittedly not exactly how Wright introduces them. He refersto them as conditions for it to be the case that the truth predicate (ina certain area) has features “which go beyond the minimal constraintsand in some way, without necessarily having any direct bearing on therelationship between that predicate and superassertibility, serve to clar-ify and substantiate realist preconceptions” [Wright 1992, 82]. Now, toshow that a truth predicate has features which go beyond Wright’s min-imal constraints is to show that it doesn’t stand for superassertibility;but it is not clear that every such “supplementary feature” is bound to“substantiate realist preconceptions”. Indeed, I will, in effect, be arguingthat there must be such features which fail to do so, and thus that theremust be room for the possibility that the truth of certain judgements de-pends on our having the capacity to know them, without their being trueconsisting in their being superassertible. If this is correct, then perhapscharity would require that Wright’s approach be interpreted as beingconsistent with this possibility. It would then have to be concluded thathe didn’t provide us (at least in this book) with any other way of charac-terizing realism than as the claim that certain judgements are such thattheir truth is independent of our having the capacity to know them.

3 Two Problems with This View

It should be clear that with such a conception of realism (and whetheror not the notion of superassertibility is to be given center stage) Wrightis following in Dummett’s footsteps. On this approach, since the truthof a judgement could depend on its being knowable only if it actuallyis knowable, the claim that a certain judgement is knowable will be anecessary ingredient of any Independence-irrealist claim (with-respect-tothis judgement). But this is a serious limitation, in that it leaves no roomfor any form of realism/irrealism which would take the relevant mentalfeature to be, e.g., our capacity to make (i.e., to think, entertain, orconceive) certain judgements, instead of our capacity to know them (ortheir negation). Both sorts of claim, it would seem, are equally plausiblerendering of the intention behind classical expressions of realism in termsof something’s being “independent of ourselves”, and no reason has beengiven so far to give precedence to knowability over conceivability.

Quite obviously, a judgement can be true independently of one’s ca-pacity to conceive it only if it is true independently of one’s capacity toknow it (for one can know only what one can conceive, and think about),but the converse is far from evident: nothing seems, prima facie, to indi-

152 Daniel Laurier

cate that a judgement could not be true independently of one’s capacityto know it without being true independently of one’s capacity to conceiveit. This is of course why Dummett, for one, went to great lenghts to es-tablish the opposite, i.e., that one cannot have the capacity to conceivewhat one cannot know. Needless to say, this is a highly controversialthesis, but it is at least understandable that one who, like Dummett,endorses it should decline to pay any special attention to the possibilityof framing realist theses in terms of conceivability instead of knowability.

But as far as I can see, Crispin Wright doesn’t have that excuse, sincehe is not committed to the claim that something is conceivable only if itis knowable, as is shown by the fact that he seems happy to grant thatone could coherently, or at least intelligibly, hold that certain judgementsare unknowable, i.e. that they “transcend” our cognitive powers. Onecould obviously not accept this while holding that we can conceive onlywhat we can (in principle) know.

Thus, unless it can be shown that we cannot conceive what we can-not know, any form of conceivability realism will be strictly strongerthan (entail) the corresponding form of knowability realism; and con-ceivability irrealism will accordingly be strictly weaker than (be entailedby) knowability irrealism. In other words, knowability realism will becompatible with conceivability irrealism.

Now consider the proposal that a judgement is true independently ofour having the capacity to know it if and only if its being true doesn’tconsist in its being superassertible. It should be obvious in light of whathas just been said that even if this were an adequate characterization ofknowability realism, it would still have nothing to do with conceivabilityrealism. In any case, there are reasons to doubt that it provides a faithfulrendering even of knowability realism, as I will now try to show.

It will help here to observe that realism about facts of a certain kindseem to entail realism about all the things involved in such facts6. Thisrests on the intuition that if a state-of-affairs obtains independently ofourselves, then all the things involved in its obtaining, and thus all itsconstituents, must similarly exist independently of ourselves. And ifthis intuition is sound, then it would also seem that a judgement can

6But the converse does not (or at least not obviously) hold: all the things involvedin the obtaining of some fact may exist independently of ourselves, without this factobtaining independently of ourselves. To see this, consider one trivial example: mycat exists independently of ourselves, and (let’s suppose) the property of being greenexists independently of ourselves, but my cat’s being green could nonetheless dependon our having painted it green. This suggests that a form of Fact-irrealism does not(as such) entail the corresponding forms of Thing-irrealism.


be true independently of ourselves only if each of its constituent termdenotes something which exists independently of ourselves; or in otherwords that realism with-respect-to judgements of a certain kind shouldentail realism with-respect-to all the terms involved in such judgements.Let’s encapsulate this thought by saying that when the realist claimsthat something is independent of ourselves, he/she means to be claimingthat it is completely independent of ourselves, but when the irrealistclaims that something is dependent on ourselves, he/she may mean tobe claiming only that it is partly dependent on ourselves. This meansthat one can be an irrealist with-respect-to judgements of a certain kindwithout being an irrealist with-respect-to all the terms involved in suchjudgements.

It is not quite obvious exactly how this should be applied to Wright’sor Dummett’s knowability framework, because it is unclear how a form ofThing-realism will have to be expressed in such a framework, and neitherof them have said much about Thing-realism. Consider the claim thatthe truth of the judgement that the sky is blue is (completely) indepen-dent of our having the capacity to know it. According to what has justbeen said, this should entail corresponding realist theses with-respect tothe terms “the sky” and “is blue”. The trouble is that nothing has beensaid about how the latter Thing-realist theses are to be understood, inthis context. The most natural way of construing them would proba-bly be as saying something like: each of these terms denotes somethingwhich exists independently of our having the capacity to know it (where“to know it” may mean either to know this thing or to know that thisthing exists). But this particular choice may not be forced upon us.

It would seem, furthermore, that if the alleged equivalence betweenthe truth of a judgement’s being independent of our capacity to know itand its truth failing to consist in its being superassertible is to be of anyuse/significance, then there will have to be some concept N , standing tosuperassertibility just as denotation stands to truth, and allowing us tosay that a certain term denotes something which exists independentlyof our capacity to know it if and only if its denoting this thing doesn’tconsist in its being N . But it is unclear what such a concept might be.

In any case, I will not need to go further into this, since I think I canmake my point without resorting to the contrast between Thing-realismand Fact-realism. For just as realism with-respect-to a given judgemententails realism with-respect-to all its constituent terms and irrealismwith-respect-to a given judgement doesn’t entail irrealism with-respect-to all its constituent terms, it would seem that realism with-respect-tosome conjunction of two judgements should entail realism with-respect-

154 Daniel Laurier

to each of them and irrealism with-respect-to some conjunction of twojudgements doesn’t entail irrealism with-respect-to each of them7.

Now suppose that the truth of the judgement that P and Q depends(in part) on our having the capacity to know it. This is compatible withthe possibility that the truth of the judgement that Q doesn’t depend atall on our having the capacity to know it. On the proposal before us, thiswould mean that while the truth of the judgement that Q doesn’t consistin its being superassertible, that of the judgement that P and Q does.In other words, it must be possible, on this view, that the conjunction ofa judgement whose being true consists in its being superassertible with ajudgement whose being true doesn’t consist in its being superassertibleshould yield a judgement whose being true nonetheless consists in itsbeing superassertible. Yet it would seem, intuitively, that a judgementwhose being true consists in its being superassertible should be one whosetruth is somehow “constituted” by our capacity to know it; and it is hardto see how its truth could then be even partly independent of this samecapacity. The trouble is not that a judgement whose truth is partly(or even completely) independent of our capacity to know it could notbe superassertible, but that I fail to see how such a judgement’s beingsuperassertible could “constitute” or somehow be identical to its beingtrue.

If this objection is sound, then it must be denied that if the truth ofsome judgement depends (in part) on our having the capacity to knowit, then its being true consists in its being superassertible; or in otherwords, that the truth of a judgement fails to consist in its being su-perassertible only if its truth is (completely) independent of our havingthe capacity to know it (though the converse implication can still be re-tained). Moreover, since this objection doesn’t obviously depend on anyspecific way of construing the notion of superassertibility, but only onthe assumption that it is an epistemic notion which satisfies the truth-involving platitudes, it would seem to warrant the conclusion that theIndependence-Irrealist, as such, is not committed to truth’s being epis-

7Does the same hold for the other propositional connectors? If not, then thestatement that realism with-respect-to a given judgement entails realism with-respect-to all its constituent terms will obviously have to be restricted to “logically simple”,predicative judgements. As far as I can see, the main point will remain unaffected,since it doesn’t need more than the assumption that if the truth of a conjunction isindependent of our capacity to know it, then so is the truth of each conjunct, whichis plausible enough. However, there may also be some plausibility to the claim thatif the truth of the negation of a judgement is independent of our capacity to knowit, then so is the truth of this judgement itself. If so, then it will follow that anytruth-functionally complex judgement is independent of our capacity to know it onlyif all its constituent judgements are.


temic, and that the disputes over realism need not be seen as disputesover the nature of truth.

It could be replied that instead of assuming that the truth of a judge-ment consists in its being superassertible if and only if it is partly de-pendent on our capacity to know it, we should assume that it consistsin its being superassertible if and only if it is completely dependent onour capacity to know it, or in other words, that the truth of a judgementfails to consist in its being superassertible if and only if it is at leastpartly independent of our capacity to know it. The trouble with thissuggestion is that the resulting position runs a serious risk of trivializingthe realist’s claims. For consider, e.g., the claim that the truth of thejudgement that the sky is beautiful is not completely dependent on ourhaving the capacity to know it. On the hypothesis we are contemplating,this amounts to the realist claim that the truth of this judgement doesn’tconsist in its being superassertible. For this claim to be true, it sufficesthat the sky exists independently of our having the capacity to know it;yet it is unlikely that the irrealist who held that the judgement that thesky is beautiful is not true independently of our having the capacity toknow it would thereby want to deny that the sky exists independentlyof our capacity to know it.

Two options present themselves, at this point. Either one takes thehard line and maintains that irrealism with-respect-to judgements of acertain kind is equivalent to the claim that the truth of judgements ofthis kind consists in their being superassertible. One is then forced toaccept that the truth of a judgment consists in its being superassertibleif and only if its truth completely depends on our capacity to know it;thus subscribing to a very demanding intuitive conception of what irre-alism amounts to, and a correspondingly lenient conception of realism.Or one opts for the soft line and insists that irrealism with-respect-tojudgements of a certain kind must be equivalent to the claim that thetruth of judgements of this kind at least partly depends on our capacityto know it; thus subscribing to a relatively lenient conception of whatirrealism amounts to, and a correspondingly demanding conception ofrealism. One is then forced to reject (the left-to-right half of) the claimthat the truth of a judgement depends on our having the capacity toknow it if and only if it consists in its being superassertible.

Now why should anyone prefer the soft line? In a sense, it doesn’tmatter which line we choose, as long as we all agree exactly what is goingon. But the foregoing discussion at least suggests that opting for thehard line would make it too easy to be a realist, and correspondingly toohard to be an irrealist. Either way, it can be seen that to substitute the

156 Daniel Laurier

question whether being true, in some area of discourse, consists in beingsuperassertible, to the question whether the judgements in this area canbe true independently of ourselves, merely masks the real structure ofthe debates and is liable to be misleading.

But, again, why prefer the soft line? Well, nothing exists unless all itsparts or aspects exist, i.e., unless it “wholly” exists; and similarly nothingobtains or is true unless it “wholly” obtains or is “wholly” true. To saythat the existence/obtaining/truth of something X depends on its beingthe case that P (e.g., on our having the capacity to know/conceive it) isat least to imply that X wouldn’t exist/obtain/be true if it were not thecase that P . For this to be true, it suffices that some part of X is suchthat it would not exist/obtain/be true if it were not the case that P .Thus, my preference for the soft line rests on what I take to be a naturalreading of the claim that the existence/obtaining/truth of X depends onits being the case that P . Taking the hard line requires that this sameclaim be read as implying that no part of X would exist/obtain/be trueif it were not the case that P , and I find this unnatural.

Observe further that something which is not completely independentfrom our capacity to know/conceive it would seem to be at least less thanfully real. By the same token, it could be said, something which is notcompletely dependent on our capacity to know/conceive it would seemto be less than fully unreal. There is admittedly an unavoidable part ofarbitrariness in the way one chooses to describe the status of something(the existence/obtaining/truth of) which is both partly dependent onand partly independent from our capacity to know/conceive it. Thereis a lot of space between the “fully real” and the “fully unreal”, whichsuggests that the simple contrast between realism and irrealism shouldeventually be replaced by some graded notion of reality/irreality, allowingone to acknowledge that some things/facts are more (or less) real thanothers. This is not the place to explore this idea in any detail, but sincetruth is not a graded notion, this may be a further indication that anyattempt to reduce the Fact-or-Judgement realism debates to disputesconcerning the nature of truth is fundamentally misguided.


References

Kvanvig, Jonathan L.

1999 Truth and Superassertibility, Philosophical Studies, 93, 1–19.

Laurier, Daniel

2005 Davidson, Mind and Reality, Principia, 9, 125–157.

Wright, Crispin

1987a Can a Davidsonian Meaning-Theory be Construed in Termsof Assertibility?, cited from [Wright 1987b, 403–432].

1987b Realism, Meaning and Truth, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed.

1992 Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard U. Press.

2003 Saving the Differences, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard U. Press.

158

Part IV

Radical Constructivism?

Was George Orwell a Metaphysical Realist?

Peter van Inwagen

The University of Notre Dame/Notre Dame, Indiana (USA)

Résumé : Le coeur de la nouvelle de George Orwell, 1984, est le débat entreWinston Smith et O’Brien dans les cellules du Ministère de l’Amour. Il estnaturel de lire ce débat comme un débat entre un réaliste (concernant la naturede la vérité) et un anti-réaliste. Je présente quelques passages représentatifsdu livre qui démontrent, je crois, que si ce n’est pas la seule manière possiblede comprendre le débat, c’est une manière très naturelle de le faire.

Abstract: The core of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is the debate betweenWinston Smith and O’Brien in the cells of the Ministry of Love. It is naturalto read this debate as a debate between a realist (as regards the nature of truth)and an anti-realist. I offer a few representative passages from the book thatdemonstrate, I believe, that if this is not the only possible way to understandthe debate, it is one very natural way.

The core of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a debate—if the verbaland intellectual component of an extended episode of brainwashing canproperly be said to constitute a debate—, the debate between WinstonSmith and O’Brien in the cells of the Ministry of Love. It is natural toread this debate as a debate between a realist (as regards the nature oftruth) and an anti-realist. I offer a few representative passages from thebook that demonstrate, I believe, that if this is not the only possible wayto understand the debate, it is one very natural way. I begin with somethoughts that passed through Winston’s mind as he was writing in hisdiary long before his arrest:

. . . the very notion of external reality was tacitly denied by[the Party’s] philosophy. . . . His heart sank as he thoughtof . . . the ease with which any Party intellectual would over-throw him in debate, the subtle arguments which he wouldnot be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he


162 Peter van Inwagen

was in the right! They were wrong and he was right! Theobvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Tru-isms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, itslaws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objectsunsupported fall toward the earth’s centre. With the feelingthat . . . he was setting forth an important axiom, Winstonwrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.If that is granted, all else follows.1

Let us now look at the debate. Here is an exchange between O’Brienand Winston.

“Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?. . . You are no metaphysician, Winston . . . Until this momentyou had never considered what is meant by existence. I willput it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely in space?Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects,where the past is still happening?”

“No”“In records. It is written down.”“In records. And—?”“In the mind. In human memories.”“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, con-trol

all records, and we control all memories. Then we controlthe past, do we not?”2

And here is a second exchange:

“But the world itself is only a speck of dust. . . the whole uni-verse is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are amillion light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.”

“What are the stars ? . . . They are bits of fire a few kilometresaway. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot

1Part 1, Ch. vii. (Since there are many editions and printings of 1984, I will citepassages from the book only by part and chapter.) As early as 1939, ten years beforethe publication of 1984, in a review of Russell’s Power: A Social Analysis, Orwellhad written, “It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two andtwo will make five when the Leader says so.” [Orwell 1939, vol. I, 376]

2Part 3, Ch.ii.

Was George Orwell a Metaphysical Realist? 163

them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sunand stars go round it. . . . For certain purposes, of course, thatis not true. When we navigate the ocean or when we predictan eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that theearth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions uponmillions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you supposeit is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? Thestars can be near or distant, according as we need them . . . .”

. . . a faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth ashe looked down at [Winston].

“I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is notyour strong point. The word you are trying to think of issolipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Col-lective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; infact, the opposite thing . . . .”3

These passages, I think, show that it is natural (which is not to say thatit is right) to read 1984 as a defense of realism. I have myself read thebook this way. (And, of course, as part and parcel of reading it thatway, I regarded Winston as representing the author’s point of view.)In my book Metaphysics—a book whose intended audience was readerswho came to the book with no clear idea of the meaning of the word‘metaphysics’—I wrote,

Before we leave the topic of Realism and anti-Realism, how-ever, I should like to direct the reader’s attention to thegreatest of all attacks on anti-Realism, George Orwell’s novel1984. Anyone who is interested in Realism and anti-Realismshould be steeped in the message of this book. The readeris particularly directed to the climax of the novel, the de-bate between the Realist Winston Smith and the anti-RealistO’Brien. In the end, there is only one question that can beaddressed to the anti-Realist: How does your position differfrom O’Brien’s? [Van Inwagen 2002,84–85]

There is one thing about this passage that I must apologize for. WhenI posed the question “How does your position differ from O’Brien’s?,” Ithought (I must confess this) that no answer to it would be forthcoming—or no honest answer, no answer that was not a transparent evasion. Butwhen I re-read 1984 in preparation for writing this paper, I discovered

3Part 3, Ch. iii.


something that I ought not to have had to discover—something that Iought to have remembered: that there is an obvious way for the anti-realist to answer this question. This obvious answer, though I think itwould in the end be an evasion, turns on a very interesting point thatwent right past me when I was writing the above passage: that in what-ever sense O’Brien may be an anti-realist, he is in the same sense arealist. To see why this is so, let us consider O’Brien’s belief that theParty invented the airplane. (The Party’s claim to have invented the air-plane is mentioned repeatedly in 1984 ; Winston thinks of it frequently,since he can remember very clearly having seen airplanes before the Rev-olution.) O’Brien believes that the Party invented the airplane becausethe Party says it invented the airplane and because all the records ofthe past (which are under the Party’s control) say the Party inventedthe airplane—as do the memories of everyone whom O’Brien regards assane. And this “because” is the “because” of formal, and not of merelyefficient, causation: in O’Brien’s mind, it is a fact that the Party says itinvented the airplane and it is a fact that the Party invented the airplaneand they are the same fact. “The Party says it invented the airplane butthe Party did not invent the airplane” is not, for O’Brien, a thinkablethought. (That is, it is not a thought he is capable of entertaining. He is,nevertheless, perfectly capable of understanding what Winston is think-ing when the thought “The Party says it invented the airplane but theParty did not invent the airplane” is present in his mind.)

O’Brien, then, certainly appears to accept a form of anti-realism.After all, solidarity, an appeal to what his peers will let him get awaywith, has replaced truth in O’Brien’s conceptual scheme, as it has (sohe claims, and if he says so, I suppose we must believe him) in RichardRorty’s—not the same sort of solidarity (or the same peers), I grant, buta sort of solidarity, nevertheless, and a very well defined class of peersindeed.

But all this, while it is accurate as far as it goes, is not a completeaccount of what O’Brien believes about truth, for he also believes inobjective truth, just as Winston does, and he believes in it in the samesense. Just as Winston believes that the pre-Revolutionary existenceof airplanes is something that is, so to speak, sitting there in the past,so O’Brien believes that the Party’s post-Revolutionary invention of theairplane is sitting there in the slightly-less-recent past. He believes thatthe Party is an infallible reporter of a truth that exists independently ofit and all its decrees. (After all, is its propaganda ministry not calledthe Ministry of Truth?) The Central Committee of the Soviet Commu-nist Party called its official organ Pravda, and the Committee did not


mean that title to be understood as implying that the paper publisheda truth created in its editorial offices; they meant it to be understood asstating, emblematically, that the statements and descriptions that werepublished in its pages were the objective truth (unlike what was to befound in capitalist or fascist or Trotskyist papers). And what was trueunder Soviet Communism was true under English Socialism: an Ingsocgoodthinker like O’Brien must believe in objective truth; how can therebe no such thing as objective truth when the Party claims to be aninfallible (and the only reliable) source of it?

How is O’Brien’s belief in objective truth to be reconciled with hisanti-realism? If by ‘reconcile’ is meant ‘demonstrate the logical consis-tency of’, it isn’t. If by ‘reconcile’ is meant ‘be able to hold both propo-sitions in one’s mind simultaneously and without intellectual discomfort’the answer is doublethink—“The power of holding two contradictory be-liefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” (Whydo O’Brien and the rest of the Party’s inner circle retain their allegianceto the existence of objective truth? Why do they not achieve logicalconsistency—doublethink requires effort; gratuitously embracing contra-dictions is a waste of effort—by simply eliminating the idea of truth andreplacing it with English-socialist solidarity? This is a very interestingquestion; I will return to it.)

I now see (I am finally getting to the end of my parenthetical confes-sion) that I made a tactical mistake when I confronted the anti-realistwith the question “How does your position differ from O’Brien’s?”. Thiswas a mistake because the anti-realist has an obvious answer to my ques-tion that obscures the real difficulty it was meant to raise—that answerbeing, “O’Brien believes in objective truth, in a kind of truth that’s inde-pendent of what our peers will let us get away with—and I don’t.” Thequestion I ought to have asked is, How does your position differ from theposition that would be O’Brien’s if one, as it were, subtracted from hisactual position the thesis that there is a status, truth, that beliefs canhave that is logically independent of the Party’s approval of them. Thatquestion allows no such evasion.

Enough of my apologetical digression. Let us return to the questionof Orwell and metaphysical realism. If I did not say, in the passage Ihave quoted (which is the only thing I have even written that pertains toOrwell and realism), that Orwell was a metaphysical realist, I certainlystrongly suggested that I regarded him as one, and I will now explic-itly say that I do regard Orwell as a metaphysical realist. In a muchmore nuanced way, Richard Rorty has also drawn a connection betweenOrwell and realism4. At any rate, Rorty does not approve of the vocab-

4In “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty,” [Rorty 1989, ch. 8,


ulary that Orwell uses when he defends what he, Orwell, calls “objectivetruth”—that phrase itself being one of Rorty’s least favorite items in any-one’s vocabulary. It is not my purpose in this paper to examine Rorty’sway of reading 1984—that is, his attempt to rescue what he regardsas valuable in the book (its depiction of a social order dedicated to theinfliction of pain as an end in itself) from its entanglement with Orwell’sunfortunate conviction that the idea of “objective truth” needed to bedefended and was worth defending. (At one point Rorty compares theway he approaches 1984 to the way he would, as an atheist, approachPilgrim’s Progress—another book he thinks can be read with profit bythose who do not share its presuppositions.) I simply call attention tothe fact that both Rorty and I see some connection between Orwell andrealism.

In a very long essay in the volume Rorty and His Critics [Conant2000], James Conant has contended that it is wrong to read 1984 as anattack on anti-realism and wrong to read the debate between O’Brienand Winston Smith as a debate about the nature of truth5. Accordingto Conant, Rorty and I are both obsessed with the realism/anti-realismdebate, and our common obsession has led us to ignore the fact thatOrwell’s purposes in defending “objective truth” were political and inno way philosophical6. Orwell (Conant maintains) had been repelled bythe kind of thought-control that British left-intellectuals of the 1930shad applied to one another with respect to the history of their time—forexample, with respect to the events of the Spanish Civil War and thearrests and trials in the Soviet Union during the Yagoda and Yezhoveras. Orwell’s purpose in writing 1984—Conant tells us—was to de-pict a society in which this thought-control had been taken to its logicalconclusion. (I will remark that I agree with Conant’s judgment that Or-

169-188].5I should point out that Conant did not miss the point about O’Brien that I

missed. He is aware that anyone who says that O’Brien is a consistent defender ofanti-realism must ignore several passages in which he seems to presuppose realism.

6I wonder why Conant thinks that I am obsessed with anti-realism. I know ofno evidence of this (other than my interpretation of 1984 ). I don’t know whetherthe fact that Rorty’s contribution to the literature on anti-realism comprises manyhundreds of thousands of words should be taken as evidence that he is obsessed withanti-realism. But if it does, there is certainly no corresponding evidence in my case.Not counting collections of my essays, I have published four books. One chapter ofone of the four—an introductory textbook—is devoted to anti-realism, and the topicis not mentioned, even in passing, in the others. I have published about 130 essays,of which only one [“On Always Being Wrong,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12(1987) pp. 95–111] is about anti-realism. The topic is not mentioned in any of theothers—with the possible exception of “The Number of Things,” Philosophical Issues,

Vol. 12: Realism and Relativism, 2002, pp. 176–96.


well wanted to depict a state in which certain intellectual habits currentamong the British intelligentsia at the time of writing were demanded,on pain of torture and death, of everyone but the Lumpenproletariat.It is entirely possible that the title 1984 is an allusion to the year ofthe novel’s composition—1948.) There is nothing philosophical, nothingmetaphysical in this purpose, Conant says. But because van Inwagen(a realist) is obsessed with the realism/anti-realism debate, he is led toread the novel as a defense of a metaphysical thesis—and to see it asa stick with which he can beat anti-realists. Because Rorty (an anti-realist) is obsessed with the realism/anti-realism debate, he misreadsOrwell’s purely political use of vocabulary like ‘objective truth’ and ‘thesolid world’ as something that calls for a philosophical response fromanti-realists—not a refutation, of course, but a reading of the novel thatde-emphasizes or re-interprets such phrases and thereby makes what isvaluable in the novel accessible to anti-realists.

I’ll let Rorty defend himself against Conant’s charge. (Hehas, in [Rorty 2000].)

Rorty, I may say, wrote a long essay on 1984. My own remarks were con-fined to a single paragraph (quoted above). I suspect that Conant wouldnot have mentioned my passing remark about 1984 if it had not suitedhis dialectical purposes to have at his disposal a metaphysician whomhe could present to Rorty as his mirror image: “Don’t you see, Rorty?You and that metaphysician are equally obsessed with realism and yourcommon obsession makes it impossible for either of you to understandthe novel—and you, Rorty, are the philosopher who claims to offer usa way of doing philosophy that will free us from our obsessions withphilosophical doctrines!” (Conant’s strategy resembles that of someonewho, in debate with a Marxist, persistently characterizes Marxism as areligion.) Still, whatever Conant’s motives for mentioning my paragraphmay have been, I want to defend what I said in it.

Conant says that Orwell is not interested in the realism/anti-realismdebate. But what does Conant mean by realism and anti-realism? He hasnot neglected this question. Far from it. His answer is both lengthy andsubtle. He lays out eight “realist theses,” and declares that anyone whoaccepts even one of them is a realist of some sort. ‘Realism’, according toConant, is as much genre-term in philosophy as it is in art or literature.Realism is not a philosophical doctrine or thesis, but rather a genre towhich certain philosophical doctrines and theses belong. Some amonghis eight realist theses are in fact inconsistent with some of the others(a fact that Conant lays some stress on), and that implies that two


philosophical doctrines that contradict each other can be equally goodexamples of the genre “realism.”

I certainly agree with Conant’s contention that 1984 is not a polemicagainst theses like the eight theses that (he says) define the philosoph-ical genre realism. At any rate, I agree with it as a judgment aboutcertain words Conant has written, the words that he has used to for-mulate the eight realist theses. (I agree that if Orwell were had openeda book that started with words like those, he would have very quicklyproceeded to close it.) I can’t agree with it as a judgment about theses,however, because there are no such theses. That is to say, the wordsConant has written formulate no theses at all. They are mere words—although, since they consist of syntactically correct declarative sentences,they have the appearance of words that express theses. I am sorry if Ihave begun to sound like a logical positivist talking about Hegel or Hei-degger. I do not, like Carnap and Neurath and the rest, have a theoryaccording to which all philosophy but my own and that of a few like-minded colleagues is meaningless. Nor do I have a theory according towhich everything that has been said by the practitioners of some majordivision of philosophy—metaphysics, for example—is meaningless. I re-pudiate any general theory that classifies some large part of philosophyas nonsense, and I shrink from sounding as if I were offering one. Never-theless, I insist that philosophers do sometimes say meaningless things,things that (to borrow the words that Wolfgang Pauli applied to a con-jecture presented by a fellow physicist) are not even false. For example:“Being is; not-Being is not” (Parmenides); “The world is a progressivelyrealized community of interpretation” (Royce); “A self is a logical con-struct out of sense experiences” (Ayer). Since I have no general theory ofmeaninglessness in philosophy—since I repudiate the possibility of sucha theory—, if I wish to show that some piece of philosophical text ismeaningless, there is nothing I can do but examine it sentence by sen-tence (even clause by clause) and try to show that there’s just nothingthere, nothing but words: that in that piece of text there are no thesesand no questions, that what might appear to be theses and questionsare only words.

I cannot go through Conant’s eight “realist” theses sentence by sen-tence, examining the meaning of each sentence and enquiring as to itsmeaning. I will illustrate my point by examining just one piece of text,his statement of the first of the eight theses:

The thesis that the Thing-in-Itself is a condition of the pos-sibility of knowledge. All our experiences of the world are of


appearances, views of it from some particular point of view.The only sorts of truths we are able to formulate are truthsabout the world under some description. But we should notmistake the limitations of our knowledge, imposed on us byour finite cognitive capacities, for limitations that are in-herent in the nature of reality as such. The idea that ourexperience is of the world (that appearances are appearancesand not mere illusions)—that is that there is something whichour descriptions are about—presupposes the further idea thatthere is a way which is the way the world is in itself. For theworld to be a possible object of knowledge, there must besuch a way that it is, apart from any description of it—away the world is when “viewed from nowhere”, that is fromno particular point of view (or, alternatively, from a God’s-eye point of view). Moreover, though such knowledge of theworld (as it is in itself) is in principle unobtainable for us, weare able to think what we cannot know: we are able to graspin thought that there is such a way the world is, apart fromthe conditions under which we know it. It is only by postu-lating the existence of such a noumenal reality that we rendercoherent the supposition that all our apparent knowledge ofreality is indeed knowledge of a genuinely mind-independentexternal reality [Conant 2000, 271–272].

These words simply bewilder me. They should bewilder anyone. Howshall I (in Quine’s fine phrase) evoke the appropriate sense of bewil-derment? I can do nothing to that end but provide a clause-by-clausecommentary on this passage, and I have no time for that. I’ll contentmyself with an examination of the clauses comprised in a single sentencefrom this passage: “For the world to be a possible object of knowledge,there must be [a way that the world is in itself], apart from any descrip-tion of it.”

“For the world to be a possible object of knowledge.” Presumably thismeans, “for anything to be a possible object of knowledge” (or “anythingexcept the contents of the knower’s own mind”?; I don’t know: one’smind is certainly a part of “the world”). The modern science of cosmologytreats the physical world—if not “the world”—as a single, unified objectand attempts to gain knowledge of it (something that Kant said couldn’tbe done). But I don’t think that Conant means this phrase to bringto the reader’s mind the issue of treating the world as a whole as anobject of knowledge. I think that the phrase should be understood asintroducing a general thesis about possible objects of knowledge. Let’s


pick a particular object—the Arc de Triomphe will do. What does thefollowing sentence mean?

For the Arc de Triomphe to be a possible object of knowl-edge, there must be a way that it is in itself, apart from anydescription of it.

I suppose that ‘the way the Arc de Triomphe is’ is an oblique way ofreferring to the properties (attributes, characteristics, features, qualities,choose what word you will) of that monument. If so, our task is tounderstand this sentence:

For the Arc de Triomphe to be a possible object of knowledge,there must be properties that it has in itself, apart from anydescription of it.

In this sentence, there are two puzzling adverbial phrases: ‘in itself’, and‘apart from any description of it’. I do not understand these adverbialphrases. Let’s take them in their turn. What does this mean

The Arc de Triomphe has, in itself, the property of being inthe center of the Place de l’Étoile?

How does saying this differ from saying that the Arc de Triomphe has(without qualification) the property of being in the center of the Placede l’Étoile? There are all sorts of adverbs and adverbial phrases thatcan meaningfully be used to qualify ‘has’ when its object is a property:‘apparently’, ‘essentially’, and ‘according to popular belief’, for example,but ‘in itself’ is not one of them. If something has a property, it is ofcourse it that has that property—I just said so. The only use of ‘initself’ that I know of in the history of philosophy that brings anythingat all to my mind has to do with secondary qualities. Thus: ‘The Arc deTriomphe is said to be white, but, really, it doesn’t have that propertyin itself; whiteness is simply a quality that exists in the minds of itsobservers’. I consider that statement to be a boring sophistry, longexposed. But suppose I’m wrong. Suppose it’s the sober truth. Thenthere’s no sense in which the Arc de Triomphe has the property of beingwhite. It just isn’t white. Things in our minds are white (or perhapswhiteness is a free-floating quality that exists in our minds but is not aquality of anything), but the Arc de Triomphe isn’t white, and there’san end on’t. But if it isn’t white, it nevertheless has other properties: ithas at least such properties as not being white and being colorless. Doesit have those properties “in itself”? The question makes no sense.


Let us turn to ‘apart from any description of it’. Whatdoes this sentence mean?

The Arc de Triomphe has, apart from any description ofit, the property of being in the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

An adverb or adverbial phrase is supposed to answer a question of somesort. In this case, the question, whatever it may be, would pertainto the Arc de Triomphe’s possession of a certain property. Here is astraightforward example of an adverbial phrase in this position:

The Arc de Triomphe has, all the guidebooks tell us, theproperty of being in the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

In this case, the question the adverbial phrase answers is “According towhom (does it have that property)?” But what question does ‘apart fromany description of it’ answer? None is apparent. None is apparent be-cause there is none. The adverbial phrase, although it violates no rule ofsyntax, has no semantical connection with the words that surround it. Imight compare this sentence with these two sentences (also syntacticallyunobjectionable):

James Conant has, apart from any visits he has made to SanFrancisco, the property of being the editor of The CambridgeCompanion to John Dewey

The Earth has, apart from any Serbian traffic regulations,the property of orbiting the sun.

I suppose I could imagine outré conversational circumstances in whichthere would be a point to uttering sentences like these, but, apart fromsome vastly improbable context of utterance, they are simply puzzling.They are puzzling because, owing to the lack of any discoverable connec-tion between the adverbial phrases ‘apart from any visits he has madeto San Francisco’ and ‘apart from any Serbian traffic regulations’ andthe other parts of the sentences in which they occur, one can discern noquestion about Conant’s editorship or the orbit of the earth for them tosupply answers to.

The role of ‘apart from any description of it’ in the sentence ‘TheArc de Triomphe has, apart from any description of it, the property ofbeing in the center of the Place de l’Étoile’ is therefore a puzzle. It is, infact, a puzzle without a solution. Anyone who thinks that this sentencemeans anything is under an illusion. What is the source of this illusion?Could it be some argument along these lines?


To say that the Arc de Triomphe has the property of being inthe center of the Place de l’Étoile is to describe it; therefore,it does not have that property apart from any description ofit. More generally, for no property that we ascribe to anyobject does that object have that property apart from anydescription of it.

Anyone who finds this argument persuasive will no doubt go on to con-tend that it is only those properties that are never ascribed to the objectx that x has apart from any description of it. Perhaps, indeed, that per-son will want to say that ‘apart from any description of it’ means ‘apartfrom any possible description of it’, and will go on to say that it is onlythose properties of x that are inexpressible in principle, inexpressible inany possible language, that x has apart from any description of it.

Is the thesis that objects have some their properties apart from anydescription of them then the thesis that some properties of each objectare inexpressible in any possible language? That is an interesting thesis.I have no idea whether it’s true, but, true or not, it does not seem to bethe thesis that Conant means to be putting forth as one example of thegenre realism. That thesis, after all, is supposed to have some connectionwith the idea of the thing-in-itself, and the thesis that there are things-in-themselves is simply not the thesis that things have properties thatcannot be expressed in any language. I have no real understanding of thewords ‘the doctrine of the thing-in-itself’ but I have a certain negativegrasp of the phrase, and that is sufficient for me to be sure that no onewho claims to understand it would say that the thesis that things hadinexpressible properties entailed (much less was identical with) the thesisthat there were things-in-themselves.

To say that the Arc de Triomphe has properties that it is impossible inprinciple to ascribe to it (and if that were true, how could anyone possiblyknow that it was true?) tells us nothing about what it might mean tosay that it has those (or any) properties ‘apart from any descriptionof it’—not in any sense that is relevant to understanding the beliefs ofrealists, at any rate. It is of course true that ex hypothesi no referenceto any linguistically inexpressible property will figure in any descriptionany possible speaker applies to the Arc de Triomphe, but, supposingthere to be realists who say that the Arc de Triomphe has those (or any)properties apart from any description of it, that fact does not tell uswhat they mean by ‘apart from any description of it’. What then dothese (perhaps fictional) realists mean by this phrase? The answer is theobvious one: they don’t mean anything by it. It is just words. “Words,words, words,” as Hamlet says.


In the end I have to say that I feel not the slightest temptation tobelieve that language like ‘If our experience of the world constitutesknowledge, then there must be a way the world is in itself, apart fromany description of it’ makes any sense at all. And I feel the same aboutmost of the sentences that make up Conant’s other “realist” theses. (Iunderstand bits and pieces of some of them, but the bits I understandall pertain to two rather special topics, morals and history. I don’t thinkthat the bits of his eight theses that I understand, taken individually ortaken together, can be said to provide a statement of a general doctrine,a doctrine that applies to human thought and discourse in general, adoctrine that could be called “realism full stop” and not simply “realismconcerning X”. I should say, too, that, although I call myself a realist, Idon’t find the bits I understand particularly plausible.)

Nevertheless, I say, I call myself a realist. But what do I mean bycalling myself a realist if I understand almost none of the sentences thatcomprise Conant’s characterization of realism—if I suppose, as I do, thatthis characterization is without sense? Well, I mean just what I said Imeant in the early bits of the chapter on realism in my book Metaphysics,the chapter that ends with my challenge to the anti-realist to say howhis position differs from O’Brien’s. I’ll briefly repeat what I said—butin different words, and with some additions.

Speakers often make assertive utterances. That is to say, speakersutter declarative sentences of languages they understand in the standardor central circumstances for the uttering of declarative sentences. (Somenon-standard or non-central circumstances: a phonetician asks you toread the written sentence ‘Mary wants to marry a merry man’ aloud;playing a minor character in Macbeth, you utter the sentence, ‘The queen,my Lord, is dead’.)

When we make assertive utterances we often say things. When, amoment ago, I uttered the sentence ‘I call myself a realist’ I thereby saidthat I called myself a realist. (But we do not always say things whenwe make assertive utterances. When Royce uttered—or inscribed—thesentence ‘The world is a progressively realized community of interpre-tation’ he said—or wrote—nothing. If what I have been saying up tothis point is true, philosophers discussing realism and anti-realism oftenmake assertive utterances without saying anything.)

When we say things, when we say something, what we say is oftentrue or false. (But not always. Sometimes what we say falls betweenthe two stools of truth and falsity. If you say that Alfred is tall, andif Alfred’s height is 181.5 cm, then what you say is neither true norfalse—since Alfred is a borderline case of a tall man.) If I told you this


morning that I had not come to Nancy directly from the US but ratherfrom Italy, what I told you is true—since I came to Nancy from Italyand not directly from the US. If I told you this morning that I came toNancy from Latvia, then what I told you was false, since I have neverbeen in Latvia.

And what is it that I say of a thing someone has said when I say thatit is true (or false)? Let us say that the things people “say” (“assert,” “af-firm”) are propositions. But the things that people say, actually say, areonly some among the things I am calling propositions, for not everythingthat someone can say is something that actually is said. No one—I amfairly confident of this—has ever said that Richard Rorty has lecturedon anti-realism at San Francisco State University and the College of theHoly Names of Jesus and Mary on the same day. Nevertheless, that issomething that could be said; that is something that it’s perfectly possi-ble to assert; that is to say, there is such a proposition as the propositionthat Richard Rorty has lectured on anti-realism at San Francisco StateUniversity and the College of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary on thesame day. I expect it’s a false proposition (if it’s true no doubt someonehas asserted it), but then lots of propositions are false—roughly half ofthem, in fact.

Am I then a platonist—a “small-’p’ platonist” at any rate? Well,yes, but I think everyone is. I don’t see how to avoid being a platonist.Everyone says things that imply the existence of things like numbersand possibilities and attributes—and propositions. You have yourselfasserted the existence of propositions if you have ever said, “Some thingsare better left unsaid.” Now someone may want to tell me that sucheveryday assertions do not commit those who make them to platonism.This is not the place to enter into a discussion of that issue. I willsay only that if such everyday assertions as “Some things are better leftunsaid” do not commit those who make them to platonism, then neitherdoes my assertion (in a philosophical lecture, to be sure, but I don’t seewhat difference that makes) that some of the things people assert aretrue commit me to platonism. If you don’t like platonism, therefore,you have as much reason to excuse me from allegiance to the doctrineyou don’t like as you have to excuse the utterer of “Some things arebetter left unsaid” from allegiance to it. Make nothing of the fact thatI call the things that are true or false (or the things that are betterleft unsaid) propositions. That’s only a word. Obviously, if the thingscan be referred to as “things that are true or false” or “things that arebetter left unsaid,” one is not going to commit oneself to any substantivephilosophical thesis by calling them by any name. “But,” the reply


comes, “the word ‘proposition’ is loaded with all sorts of metaphysicalbaggage.” I doubt that. But if it is true, I hereby unload it: in thislecture, ‘proposition’ means only ‘thing that is either true or false (orindeterminate as between truth and falsity)’.

All right. There are all these propositions. Some are true and someare false. (From now on, I’ll ignore the tertium datur, indeterminacy.)Are truth and falsity properties of propositions? I would say so, andI would say that this is a harmless thing to say. If a proposition is athing that is true or false, a property is a thing that is true or false ofsomething. If a proposition is something one can assert, a property issomething one can assert of something. The proposition that Paris isthe capital of France is something that one can assert. “That it is inFrance” is something that one can assert of things: it can be assertedtruly of Paris and Nancy and the Arc de Triomphe, and falsely (onlyfalsely) of Rome and Bergamo and the Arch of Janus. “That it is inFrance” is therefore a property, or at least it is what I am calling aproperty. And truth and falsity are certainly properties in that sense,for “that it is true” is something that can be said of propositions—trulyof the proposition that Paris is the capital of France and falsely of theproposition that Nancy is the capital of France.

What properties are truth and falsity? I would restate the questionthis way: can the open sentences ‘x is true’ and ‘x is false’ be given usefuldefinitions? (If they can, the definitions will in effect be statements ofwhat it is that we are saying of a thing when we say that it is true or saythat it is false.) I think that the answer to this question is No. Truthand falsity are indefinable properties of propositions. I say this because Ihave a certain view of quantifiers and variables—essentially Quine’s viewof quantifiers and variables. According to this view, the only variablesare nominal variables, variables that occupy nominal positions. If thisis so, then what Dorothy Grover and others have called propositionalquantification (I prefer “quantification into sentential positions”) doesnot exist. That is to say, expressions like

∀p∃q(p → q)

make no sense. If Quine is right about the nature of quantification—as I suppose him to be—the meaningful sentence that comes closestto saying the thing this meaningless sentence is trying to say (I hopeyou understand that) must contain nominal variables whose range is thebearers of truth-value (sentences Quine would say; propositions I say)and a truth-predicate. The meaningful sentence that comes closest to


saying the thing this meaningless sentence is trying to say is this one:

∀x∃y(the conditional with antecedent x and consequent y is true)

Now why is this thesis of Quine’s about the nature of quantificationrelevant to the issues we are discussing? Why should it be of interestto philosophers whose concern is the realism/anti-realism debate? Theanswer is not far to seek. If there were such a thing as quantification intosentential positions, then, every schoolboy knows, it would be possibleto define truth and falsity. Here’s the definition of truth (assuming thatthe bearers of truth-value are propositions; let those who say that thebearers of truth value are sentences modify this definition in such a waythat it exhibits truth as a property of sentences).

x is true =df ∃p(p&x = the proposition that p).

But this definition is not available to anyone who (like Quine and me)finds no sense in the idea of variables that occupy sentential—or any non-nominal—positions. The definiens, we say, is a meaningless sentence.And what do we say is the meaningful sentence that comes closest tosaying the thing this meaningless sentence is trying to say? We say it’sthis sentence

∃y(y is a proposition & y is true & x = y).

And to say that a proposition is true if it is identical with some trueproposition is hardly to provide an adequate definition of truth! It is forjust this reason that I say that no definition of truth is possible. I have,of course, examined only the sort of definition of truth that is in somesense a generalization of sentences like ‘The proposition that Paris is thecapital of France is true if and only if Paris is the capital of France’. Iconcede that there are other possibilities7 . For present purposes I willsay only that I doubt whether truth can be defined and that I certainlydon’t want to accept any position that depends on the assumption thattruth can be defined.

Truth and falsity, then, are properties, indefinable properties of manyof the things we say and write and of many things that have neverbeen said or written. (Consider the grammatical sentences of Englishthat contain twenty or fewer words. The linguists tell us that there are

7For a detailed discussion of issues related to those my brief remarks on thissubject have raised, see my essay “Generalizations of Homophonic Truth-sentences”in Richard Schantz (ed.) What is Truth?, (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2002),pp. 205–222.


about1080 of them, a number comparable to the number of electrons inthe observable universe. Most of these sentences, obviously, have neverbeen spoken or written and never will be.) Though these properties areindefinable, we have a perfect grasp of them. That is, we understandperfectly the predicates that express them. If you understand whatsomeone is saying when he utters the English sentence, “Some of thethings Dean said about Nixon were true and some weren’t,” then youunderstand the predicate ‘. . . is true’. If you understand the predicate‘. . . is true’, you know what someone speaking English is saying aboutsomething when he says that it’s true. And if you know that, you graspthe property truth, for the property truth is just that thing that someonesays about something when he says that it’s true. Just as being in thecenter of the Place de l’Étoile is a property of the Arc de Triomphe,truth is a property of the proposition that the Arc de Triomphe is inthe center of the Place de l’Étoile. And in these two statements, ‘is aproperty of’ has exactly the same sense.

If truth and falsity are properties of propositions, it seems reasonableto classify them as relational properties of propositions (at least in thecase in which they are properties of contingent propositions). But I hes-itate so to classify them because there are problems about how to define‘relational property’. I do regard the analogy with the accuracy andinaccuracy of maps as having some power to convince me that truth andfalsity are relational properties. Accuracy and inaccuracy are propertiesof maps (among other things). That is, “That it is accurate” and “Thatit is inaccurate” are things that you can say about maps. And it seemsthat a map that was accurate can become inaccurate (a river changesits course; the coastlines change because the polar caps are melting) andthat its becoming inaccurate is normally a “mere-Cambridge” change inthe map. Similarly—the analogy suggests—, the proposition that Parisis the capital of France may one day become false, and if it does, that willbe a mere-Cambridge change in that proposition, a change that is dueentirely to a real change in France and her political structure. If one isnot altogether happy with this way of talking (as I am not), this will bebecause one regards oneself as pretty much ignorant in the matter of thenature of propositions and thus as not in a position to make judgmentsabout which changes in them are mere-Cambridge changes and whicharen’t. (I know what propositions do but not what they are.)

Nevertheless, one of the things you can say truly about the proposi-tion that Paris is the capital of France is that it’s a contingent propositionand another is that it’s a true proposition. And there’s an importantdifference between these two things: even God can’t do anything about


the first, and the second is something that even human beings have thepower to change. And, if they wished to change it, they would change itby altering matters in France and not by somehow working directly onthe proposition—words that are either meaningless or express a meta-physical impossibility. Whether you describe this difference by sayingthat contingency is an intrinsic and truth a relational property of theproposition that Paris is the capital of France or describe it in some otherway, the difference is there to be described. And this difference from con-tingency in this way is an important feature of truth. Despite the factthat no conceptual confusion is involved in the statement that someonehas caused a certain proposition to be true (I remind you that one causesthe proposition that one smokes to be false by stopping smoking, not bysomehow operating directly on the proposition that one smokes), thetruth of many true propositions (and the falsity of many false ones) iscausally independent of any human activity. We may cite the propositionthat Mt Everest is 8849.87 meters high, the proposition that somewhereon Mars there are the ruins of an advanced civilization that flourishedmillions of years ago, and the proposition that the dinosaurs were mam-mals. The first is true and the second false; the third is one or the other(unless borderline cases are involved), although I don’t know which. Asto my contention that the first is true independently of all human ac-tivity, I hope no one is going to tell me that the proposition that MtEverest is 8849.87 meters high would not be true if the metric system oflinear measure had never been devised or if Mt Everest had been namedafter Colonel Lambton instead of Colonel Everest.

And I hope no one is going to tell me that the height of Mt Everestis inherently and inescapably a matter of convention—owing to the factthat geographers have agreed that the height of a mountain is to bethe distance from the center of the earth of its highest point minus theaverage distance of the surface of the sea at the latitude of the mountainfrom the center of the earth. If anyone does tell me this thing I hope noone is going to tell me, I shall reply as follows. There is indeed such aconvention. And it does indeed have something to do with what it is thatEnglish-speakers say (and say truly) when they utter the sentence ‘MtEverest is 8849.87 meters high’. For that matter, it has something, andexactly the same thing, to do with what they would say if for some bizarrereason they uttered the sentence ‘Mt Everest is five meters high’. Butconsider the thing that English-speakers in fact say when they utter theformer sentence—and not what they would say when they uttered thatsentence if some possible alternative convention concerning the heightsof mountains were in force. That thing is true, and its truth has every-


thing to do with the topography of the Earth’s crust and nothing to dowith anything else—and, most emphatically, it has nothing to do withhuman beings and their conventions. I call that thing by the name ‘theproposition that Mt Everest is 8849.87 meters high’. (At any rate, that’sthe name I call it by when I’m speaking to an audience of philosophers.)If different conventions about the use of ‘height’ were in force, that namemight well be a name for a different proposition. But they aren’t andit isn’t. And the thing the name in fact names is true no matter whatanyone calls it. And it would be true in any counterfactual circumstancein which the topography of the Earth’s surface was as it in fact is, evenif that counterfactual circumstance were so remote as not to include theexistence of human beings.

And that’s what I call realism: the thesis there are true propositions—contingently true propositions—that would be true no matter what hu-man beings had ever done and even if human beings had never existed.(And, of course, this point about truth applies, mutatis mutandis, to fal-sity.) And I expect Orwell would agree with me on that point—althoughhe might think it a matter of some importance that I should add to what Ihave said a clause that said explicitly that a certain class of propositionsbelonged to this category, viz. propositions about the past. Although itis a nice philosophical question what it is for a proposition to be aboutthe past (see any philosophical debate about divine foreknowledge andfreedom), it is certainly true that there are many, many propositionsthat are uncontroversially about the past. For example, that ElizabethI died in 1603 or that Trotsky was murdered by an NKVD agent in 1940.Orwell would say, and I would agree, that any proposition of this sort—any proposition that is what I have called “uncontroversially about thepast”—is either true or false (unless it is indeterminate; the propositionabout Trotsky’s murder would be neither true nor false if, e.g., RamónMercader’s relation to the NKVD was ambiguous and he could not besaid without qualification to have been an agent of the NKVD or not tohave been an agent of the NKVD). And if it is now true that Elizabeth Idied in 1603, it will continue to be true even if everyone should somehowcome to believe that she died in 1605 or that she was immortal and stilllived or that she had never lived at all.

I do not see how anyone could disagree with me about this, coulddispute either my general thesis or the codicil I have imagined that Orwellmight want to add to it. I do not see how anyone could maintain thatthere is no such property as truth, and I do not see how anyone couldmaintain that there is such a property but whether something has it isin every case causally dependent on the actions of human beings. I do


not see how anyone could think that “Elizabeth I died in 1603” mighthave been true in 1955 and have become false at some point in thetumultuous 1960s. I do not think anyone does disagree with me aboutthese things. At any rate, I do not think that Conant disagrees with me.(O’Brien would disagree—but he would also agree. Doublethink makesthat possible.)

Suppose someone—I do not say “Conant,” just “someone”—were toreply as follows. “Yes, no one would disagree with you about any ofthat stuff (or no one but an Ingsoc doublethinker who also agreed withyou). And, yes, those are just the theses Orwell wanted to defend, evenif his vocabulary was not quite the same as yours. But they’re notmetaphysical theses.”

I suppose I’d have to ask that person what he thought a metaphysicalthesis was. Some at least of the theses I have put forward are certainlynot empirical theses. (Small-p platonism, for example.) When I advancethese theses, what I say cannot be refuted by observation or experiment.They thus have the feature that the logical positivists used as the touch-stone of metaphysics. They are, moreover, theses about a concept, truth,that is as general a concept as there could be. If I tell you that every-thing Professor X says in his new book is true, that will give you noclue whatever as to what the book is about. Is it about number theory,epistemology, geology, tax law, the history of public finance in Tuscany. . . ? The word ‘true’ is like the words ‘and’ and ‘whether’ and ‘is’; it iswhat the Oxford philosophers of the fifties called a topic-neutral word.(If someone blots out all the words in a treatise but the topic-neutralwords, a reader who examines the defaced text will have no way of know-ing what the subject of the treatise is.) A predicate that is formed froma topic-neutral adjective like ‘true’ is as general a predicate as a predi-cate can be. A property that is, like truth, expressed by a predicate ofthis sort seems to be at least a good candidate for the office “propertyof interest to metaphysicians.”

Does this mean, then, that Orwell was interested in metaphysics?Well, certainly not as a discipline, not as an area of theoretical enquiry.But he was interested in and accepted certain theses that I, at any rate,insist are metaphysical theses, and he thought that what people believedabout these theses was tremendously important—which is not to say thathe would have been at all interested in the arguments metaphysicianshave used to attack or defend them. (If you summarized a page of Rortyto him, he would very likely have said something along the lines of, “Onehas to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary


man could be such a fool.”8) Here is something that Orwell once saidthat illustrates how a person with no theoretical interest in metaphysicscan have beliefs about matters that metaphysicians dispute about—andcan find reason to appeal to these beliefs in an essay on politics. Thisis from Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn;” his topic is the historicalcontinuity of England:

What can the England of 1940 have in common with theEngland of 1840? But then, what have you in common withthe child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on themantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be thesame person [Orwell 1940, 57].

The last sentence presupposes a view of personal identity that has beendisputed by great philosophers. Many metaphysicians would follow Humeand say that the adult reader of “The Lion and the Unicorn” and thechild of five were simply not identical with one another; a modern, scien-tific philosopher like Reichenbach who took more or less the Humean linewould say that the adult reader and the child were two distinct tempo-ral segments of an four-dimensional “space-time worm.” (I am sure thatOrwell knew, in a purely intellectual sort of way, as a matter of obscurehistorical fact, that Hume and other philosophers had had various thingsto say about personal identity across time, but I don’t suppose that anythoughts about Hume or philosophy were in his mind when he wrote thewords I have quoted.) Other metaphysicians would agree with Orwell inhis contention that the adult and the child were the same person—butthese metaphysicians fall into several camps and, when they can sparetime from arguing with the Humeans, argue endlessly with one anotherabout what it is to for a person who exists at one time to be identicalwith a person who exists at another time. Orwell would certainly nothave been interested in their interminable debate. (“The subtle argu-ments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer”?Despite what some have said, I’m sure he was able to understand them,insofar as there is anything in them susceptible of being understood. It’sjust that he would have considered it a waste of his time to try to un-derstand them.) But although he would not have been interested in thedebate, he did in fact accept at least one of the theses the debate wasabout.

8I concede that that famous remark (usually misquoted) was actually directedat a straightforwardly political thesis—that “American troops had been brought toEurope not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution.” [Orwell 1945,379].


Or so I say. Other philosophers will insist that none of the thesesthat would figure in a four-way dispute about personal identity amongDerek Parfit, Roderick Chisholm, David Lewis, and myself were thesesthat Orwell either accepted or rejected or had so much as entertained.They will say that when Orwell said “you happen to be the same per-son,” what he was saying was something that the four metaphysicianswere in agreement about. And someone—I do not say “Conant,” just“someone”—might say the corresponding thing about what Orwell wassaying when he said, “Facts exist independently of us and are more orless discoverable”: that this statement is something that all the parties tothe realism/anti-realism debate agree on, and that the points on whichthey disagree would have been of no interest to Orwell.

Well, perhaps so. All I can say is, if realism is not the thesis that facts(some facts, at any rate) exist independently of us, I do not know whatrealism is. (I take “Facts exist independently of us” to be another wayof saying that truth exists independently of us. In other words, words aphilosopher might use, “Truth is radically non-epistemic.”) And if anti-realism is not the denial of the thesis that facts exist independently ofus, I do not know what anti-realism is. And if the question whether factsexist independently of us is not a metaphysical question, I do not knowwhat a metaphysical question is.

I wish to end with a discussion of a question I raised earlier: Whydoes O’Brien retain his allegiance to the existence of objective truth?Why does he not achieve logical consistency by simply eliminating theidea of truth and replacing it with Party solidarity? Or, if you like, whydoes Orwell not represent O’Brien as achieving logical consistency byrefusing to affirm the existence of objective truth? The answer to bothquestions, I believe, lies in this fact: it is not possible consistently toreject the existence of objective truth. It is indeed possible to deny theexistence of objective truth—I’ve seen it done—, but it is not possiblenot to affirm the existence of objective truth. And, therefore, anyonewho denies the existence of objective truth will also affirm its existence.And why do I say that it is not possible not to affirm the existence ofobjective truth? Because, I say, it is not possible to go through lifewithout asserting things, and everyone who asserts anything therebyaffirms the existence of objective truth. Consider this sentence, whichcould certainly be used to make an assertion:

The Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

I’ll call this sentence the “core sentence.” Each of the following foursentences is a logical consequence of the core sentence:


It is true that the Arc de Triomphe is in the center of thePlace de l’Étoile

It is objectively true that the Arc de Triomphe is in the cen-ter of the Place de l’Étoile

The proposition that the Arc de Triomphe is in the center ofthe Place de l’Étoile corresponds to reality

The Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Place de l’Étoileeven if everyone believes that the Arc de Triomphe is some-where else.

If anyone doubts whether the second of these sentences is a logical con-sequence of the core sentence, I would ask him whether he thinks thatthere is or could be something that is true but not objectively true—andI hope that if he says there is, he will provide me with an example. Toexplain the distinction between “true” and “objectively true” is a prob-lem for rhetoric or pragmatics, not for logic or semantics. (If anyoneis interested in discussing Kierkegaard’s “Truth is subjectivity,” I’d behappy to do so. For the present, I’ll record my conviction that this in-teresting thesis has nothing to do with the realism/anti-realism debate.)If anyone doubts whether the third sentences is a logical consequence ofthe core sentence, I would ask him how he would define ‘The propositionthat p corresponds to reality’. I would offer him either of two definientiafor this schema: he may choose between ‘The proposition that p is true’and, simply, ‘p’. If “corresponds to reality” is not be understood in eitherof these ways, I don’t know how it is to be understood. As for the fourthand final sentence, note that

If the Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Place de l’Étoile,then the Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Place del’Étoile even if everyone believes that the Arc de Triompheis somewhere else

is equivalent to

If the Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Place de l’Étoile,then, if everyone believes that the Arc de Triomphe is some-where else, the Arc de Triomphe is in the center of the Placede l’Étoile,


which is an instance of a theorem of sentential logic (If p, then if q thenp). If one asserts something, one commits oneself to the truth of itslogical consequences—or at any rate one does if one knows that they arelogical consequences of what one has asserted. Logical consequences ofthe sort I have set out are, I think, sufficiently obvious that if someonemakes an assertion, any assertion whatever, he commits himself to thetruth of that assertion, to the objective truth of that assertion, to thatassertion’s corresponding to reality, and to its being true (and objectivelytrue and in correspondence with reality) no matter what anyone else maybelieve. It is for this reason that even the Party cannot dispense withthe idea of a truth that exists independently of its decrees. The Partymust make assertions (that it invented the airplane; that Oceana is atwar with Eastasia and has always been at war with Eastasia) and cannotforbid its servants to make assertions (it must insist that they make thesame political assertions it does; and, in any case, it is not possible forpeople to conduct the simplest affairs of everyday life without makingassertions). And making assertions commits one to realism: to say thatthe Party invented the airplane is to say that it is the objective truththat the Party invented the airplane and would be the objective trutheven if everyone believed that the Party had not invented the airplane.

References

Brandom, Robert B., (ed.)

2000 Rorty and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell.

Conant, James

2000 Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell, in [Bran-dom 2000, 268–342].

Orwell, George

1939 Review of Bertrand Russell, Power: A Social Analysis, citedaccording to [Orwell & Angus 1968, vol. I, 375–376].

1940 The Lion and the Unicorn, cited according to [Orwell & Angus1968, vol. II, 56–109].

1945 Notes on Nationalism, cited according to [Orwell & Angus 1968,vol. III, 361–380].

Orwell, Sonia & Angus, Ian (eds.)

1968 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Or-well, 4 volumes; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.


Rorty, Richard

1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

2000 Response to James Conant, in [Brandom 2000, 342–350].

Van Inwagen, Peter

2002 Metaphysics, 2nd ed. Boulder CO and London: Westview Pressand Oxford University Press.

186

(Anti)Realist Implications of a Pragmatist

Dual-Process Active-Externalist

Theory of Experience

Tom Burke

University of South Carolina

Résumé : Les questions relatives à l’opposition réalisme/antiréalisme sontabordées à la lumière d’une philosophie pragmatiste de l’esprit. On élabore unephilosophie pragmatiste de l’esprit dans les termes d’une théorie ‘externaliste-active’ de l’expérience vue comme double processus. Cette théorie pose enprincipe deux types d’expérience tels que la ‘mentalité’ (en tant que capacitéà penser, émettre des hypothèses, formuler des théories, raisonner, délibérer)constitue l’un des deux types d’expérience. La correspondance formelle de lathéorie avec les faits est caractérisée en termes de correspondance fonctionnelleentre ces deux types d’expérience. On discute alors les aspects réalistes etconstructivistes de cette conception. L’externalisme-actif garantit une sorte deréalisme écologique, qui permet à la théorie d’éviter le constructivisme radicalou l’irréalisme.

Abstract: Realism/antirealism issues are considered in light of a pragmatistphilosophy of mind. A pragmatist philosophy of mind is cast in terms of adual-process active-externalist theory of experience. This theory posits twokinds of experience such that mentality (as a capacity for thinking, hypothe-sizing, theorizing, reasoning, deliberating) constitutes one of the two kinds ofexperience. The formal correspondence of theory with facts is characterized interms of a functional correspondence between these two kinds of experience.Realist and constructivist aspects of this view are then discussed. Active-externalism guarantees a kind of ecological realism that allows the theory toavoid radical constructivism or irrealism.

The pragmatist philosophy of mind outlined in the first half of thispaper is designed to shed light on what William James and John Deweywere concerned with a century ago in their wholesale rejection of tra-ditional epistemology and metaphysics. What they took to be a viablealternative, if comprehensible at all, may seem irrelevant if not entirely


188 Tom Burke

foreign to contemporary philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, contempo-rary philosophy of mind at least in some quarters is beginning to echoviews proposed by James and Dewey.

These latter views, of course, have implications ranging beyond thephilosophy of mind as such. The second half of the present paper looksat issues of realism and antirealism, discussing ways in which a prag-matist theory of experience incorporates both constructivist and realisttendencies and thus works toward resolving conflicts between hardcorerealism and equally hardcore antirealism.

In his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rortymakes the following interesting statement:

On the account of recent analytic philosophy which I offered inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Rorty 1979], the history ofthat movement has been marked by a gradual “pragmaticization”of the original tenets of logical positivism. On the account of re-cent “Continental” philosophy which I hope to offer in a book onHeidegger which I am writing, James and Nietzsche make parallelcriticisms of nineteenth-century thought. Further, James’s versionis preferable, for it avoids the “metaphysical” elements in Nietzschewhich Heidegger criticizes, and, for that matter, the “metaphysi-cal” elements in Heidegger which Derrida criticizes. On my view,James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialec-tical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting atthe end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze arecurrently traveling. [Rorty 1982, xviii ]

What Rorty means by that last sentence is that James and Dewey man-aged to do early on what analytic and “Continental” philosophy wouldboth eventually do, namely, “find a way of setting Philosophy to oneside” [xxi ] in favor of plain everyday “philosophy.” On this view “thebest hope for philosophy is not to practice Philosophy”—neither to givein to the Platonic urge to “believe more truths or do more good or bemore rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality”[xv ], nor to make Philosophy scientific, as the logical positivists hopedfor—but to adopt a naturalistic, behavioristic stance towards language,knowledge, and related matters of common human interest [xxi ].

That may all be true; but Rorty’s last sentence above rings true inanother sense that he perhaps would not acknowledge. The naturaliza-tion of philosophy has progressed at a brisk pace over the hundred-plusyears that pragmatism has been a going concern. Riding the wave ofDarwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and witnessing

(Anti)Realist Implications. . . 189

the rise of the new physics and its affects on epistemology at the begin-ning of the twentieth century, classical pragmatists also contributed notonly to the professionalization of philosophy in the U.S. but to the emer-gence of psychology as a science distinct from philosophy or logic. Yet itwould seem that pragmatism disappeared from sight in the latter half ofthe twentieth century just as we began to see momentous developmentsin mathematics, statistics, logic, linguistics, and the sciences generally.These latter developments supplied many of the basic tools, topics, andissues of analytic philosophy, taking American philosophy in directionsthat James and Dewey never imagined. Are they indeed waiting at theend of that dialectical road?

Well, yes. Rorty’s characterization of analytic philosophy as eventu-ally finding ways to set Philosophy aside does not easily accommodatethe fact that analytic philosophy in the twentieth century was as much“technicalized” in particular ways as it was naturalized or “pragmati-cized” in the course of assimilating methods from neighboring disciplines.Such developments have not always been so much “in favor of everyday‘philosophy’” as Rorty would have us believe. Pro-Philosophical twistsand turns in that technicalization easily explain why pragmatism largelyreceded from view for much of the last half of the twentieth century, as ifanalytical philosophy balked and refused to go where its dialectical trav-els were taking it. Indeed, it is not often thought that James or Deweymight have something to contribute to the more technical developmentsthat characterized this new dialectic. Nevertheless, where James andDewey are waiting lies in a direction allowing greater technicalizationbut without a regressive Philosophy. By advocating substantive ideasand methodologies better suited for a comprehensively naturalized phi-losophy free from having to bear Philosophical loads, James and Deweyanticipated much of where analytic philosophy should have headed muchearlier than it now seems to be heading.

In particular, Dewey developed conceptions of experience, learning,inquiry, and intelligence that are supposed to hold up to scrutiny notonly in science or only in the classroom but generally in any phase oraspect of human life. Minimally, recent work in the philosophy of mind(despite previous detours) provides an interesting perspective on whatDewey was attempting to do. Work in the cognitive sciences has maturedsufficiently in the last few decades so that certain recent developmentscan with only minor modification be incorporated into Dewey’s theoryof experience without compromising either of the two in any significantway. The benefits go both ways in that Dewey’s theory of experiencecan positively contribute to these recent developments while the em-

190 Tom Burke

pirical and explanatory strength of the latter may help to render morecomprehensible the contrarian approach to epistemology and metaphys-ics that James and Dewey were advocating.

1 A Pragmatist Philosophy of Mind

By pragmatist lights, a major obstacle to progress in the philosophy ofmind even to the present day is a faulty conception of the relation ofmind to the head and to the world outside the head. This is evidentin characterizations of the so-called “easy problems” of consciousness—problems, for example, of explaining the role of intentional states in con-trolling behavior, the reportability of mental states, the discriminationand categorization of stimuli, the focus of attention, and so on (versus the“hard problem” of accounting for the qualitative, phenomenal, subjectivewhat-it’s-like nature of experience). Allegedly, the “easy” problems canbe handled by neurobiology and computation theory [Chalmers 1995],[Chalmers 2002]—as if cognitive science only (or primarily) needs to fig-ure out how the computer inside the head works. The problem here isneither with neurobiology nor with computation theory, of course, butwith the uncritical assumption that the relevant locus of computationis exclusively inside the head. The “easy” problems thus are not beingsolved precisely because proposed solutions are based on a neuro-centricorientation to various basic distinctions—between mind and world, ideasand things, theories and facts. This neuro-centric bias by itself is enoughto make the easy problems impossible to solve.

1.1 Folk Psychology and a Pragmatist Alternative

A generic though simplistic version of this way of thinking is depictedin Figure 1. In this view, everything is essentially aligned with an in-ner/outer brain/world distinction, including causal linkages going fromouter to inner and vice versa. In particular, experience (sensation, per-ception) involves causal relations whereby the world impresses itself uponthe mind. Conversely, the action arrow depicts causal relations in theopposite direction, often rationally mediated, whereby the external en-vironment is manipulated according to the mind’s dictates.

Representation (a relation by which the mind and/or brain mirrorsthe world as well as its own workings) and intentionality (a relation ofdirectedness toward an object, whether external or internal, real or un-real) are often cited in explanations of the internal (ir)rational processes


that mediate experience and action. There are many versions and refine-ments of this basic perspective. So far, none of it works, as confirmedby any recent philosophy-of-mind reader.

For what it is worth, we may contrast the foregoing folk perspectivewith a pragmatist theory of experience. A preliminary formulaic claimutilizing contemporary terminology goes as follows: a pragmatist theoryof experience = active externalism + a dual process theory of rationality+ some additional tweaking.

It is assumed that what follows the “=” is known to the reader, thougha quick summary may be useful. On one hand, active externalism isthe view that the environment external to the brain and nervous sys-tem plays an active role in constituting and driving cognitive processes[Clark 1997], [Clark 2001], [Clark 2003], [Clark & Chalmers 1998], [Noë2004], [Rockwell 2005]. This is a fairly radical refashioning of the se-mantic externalism of [Putnam 1975] and [Burge 1979], embracing aform of cognitive externalism and, respectively, a version of epistemicexternalism that does not presuppose cognitive internalism. Epistemicexternalism in particular relies on notions of epistemic deference con-sistent with Burge’s conception of semantic deference or what Putnamcalls the linguistic division of labor. In this case knowledge encompassesmaterial artifacts [Baird 2004] and is socially distributed [Hardwig 1985],[Hutchins 1995], [Longino 2006]. Granted, this version of epistemic ex-ternalism is just the relatively uncontentious though nonstandard viewthat an individual’s knowledge includes factors external to the individ-ual’s head and brain without being external to the individual’s rangeof possible experience, requiring no commitments either way concerningwhat may be altogether beyond the individual’s ken.

‘‘INNER’’ / BRAIN / ORGANISM / THOUGHTS

/ CONCEPTS / IDEAS

‘‘OUTER’’ / EXTERNAL WORLD / ENVIRONMENT /

FACTS / KINDS / THINGS /…

ACTIONEXPERIENCE

Figure 1: mind vs world = brain vs environment?

192 Tom Burke

On the other hand, dual-process theories of rationality posit two com-plimentary cognitive systems: (1) an evolutionarily older system that isfast, associative, automatic, unconscious, parallel, implicit, intuitive, in-stinctive, compulsory, affective, impulsive, rigid, involuntary; versus (2)a more recently evolved system that is slow, rule-based, controlled, con-scious, serial, explicit, rational, reflective, deliberate, symbolic, verbal,flexible, pliable [Frankish 2004], [Stanovich 1999], [Stanovich 2004].

We can combine these two views to obtain a pragmatist theory of ex-perience if two other insights from James and Dewey are also included.First, we have to reformulate the notion of experience not to embracetraditional empiricism but, more interestingly, so that thinking (reason-ing, reflecting, deliberating, theorizing) are cast as one of two kinds ofexperience. In effect, this means that we should work primarily in termsof a dual-process theory of experience, rather than of cognition or mindor rationality.

Second, we need to peel various distinctions apart, introducing twoninety-degree shifts in perspective. Specifically, (1) distinctions betweenthings and ideas, facts and theories, or perceiving and reasoning are tobe regarded as orthogonal to an inner/outer distinction, being aligned in-stead with the two kinds of experience just mentioned (fast vs slow); and(2) intentionality, contrary perhaps to what has been made of Brentano’soriginal conception of it [Brentano 1874], is to be regarded primarily as akind of directedness towards maladjusted situations requiring resolution,where the breakdown/resolution distinction is itself orthogonal to boththe inner/outer and the theory/fact distinctions. So, instead of aligningeverything in parallel with an inner/outer distinction as in Figure 1, wewould have an array of (at least) three independent (orthogonal) sets ofdistinctions.

Detailed textual evidence will not be presented here; but the key ideasoutlined in the preceding paragraphs are present in William James’s Es-says in Radical Empiricism [James 1912], The Meaning of Truth [James1909], Principles of Psychology [James 1890], and elsewhere. Likewise,these ideas can be found in John Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic[Dewey 1916], Reconstruction in Philosophy [Dewey 1920], Experienceand Nature [Dewey 1925], The Quest for Certainty [Dewey 1929], andelsewhere. These texts deserve careful scrutiny, particularly in light oftheir contributions to the philosophy of mind. The point here is thatsome important recent developments in the philosophy of mind are actu-ally not so recent. Among the classical pragmatists, Dewey in particularcharacterized an inner/outer distinction in objective biological and eco-logical terms of organisms and their environments. Moreover, instead of


associating thinking or reasoning exclusively with the organism, he pro-posed (1) an ecological form of active externalism where experience is aninteractive temporal process taking place in arenas of organism/environ-ment transactions, (2) a dual-process theory of experience where think-ing/reasoning/deliberating are cast as one of two kinds of experience(instinctual vs deliberate), and (3) a view that experiences (in a countsense of the term; both fast and slow) are situated and episodic, directedtowards accomplishing resolutions of breakdowns.

In particular, Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary ex-perience in Experience and Nature [Dewey 1925, 15–17] is orthogonal to adistinction between what is outside versus inside the head, though it par-allels distinctions between things and ideas, facts and theory, perceivingand reasoning. Meanwhile, the breakdown/resolution distinction thatcharacterizes the situated, episodic “intentional” nature of experiences isDewey’s generalized version of a doubt/belief conception of inquiry. Onthis account, the breakdown/resolution distinction—orthogonal both toan inner/outer distinction and to a primary/secondary distinction—ispart of a theory of experience such that inquiries make up a particu-lar class of experiences, that is, such that inquiries are experiences. Inother words, one does not posit an independent conception of experi-ence and only then address breakdown/resolution processes (for exam-ple, problem-solving that sooner or later must “face the tribunal of senseexperience”) but rather the latter processes are constitutive of a properconception of experience to begin with.

On this view, intentionality is indeed what distinguishes us as livingcreatures—that is, creatures capable of what Dewey calls psycho-physicalactivity [Dewey 1925, 198]—though that notion has to be coupled with adual-process theory of experience to account for what distinguishes us asthinking psycho-physical creatures “capable of that organized interactionwith other living creatures which is language, communication” [198].

These distinctions are depicted in Figures 2 and 3. In contrast withFigure 1, Figure 2 depicts a distinction between two kinds of experi-ence that is orthogonal to an inner/outer distinction. As Dewey ex-plains it, primary experience is a kind of organism/environment interac-tion that is instinctive and habitual—yielding “gross, macroscopic, crudesubject-matters” that constitute apparent things and facts as they aredirectly encountered. Primary experience furnishes brute data for sec-ondary experience. Conversely, secondary experience is a kind of organ-ism/environment interaction that is reflective, deliberate, speculative—utilizing ideas, hypotheses, theories, and the like in efforts to explain andregulate the ongoing course of primary experience.

194 Tom Burke

This distinction between facts and theories (and thus between pri-mary and secondary experience), again, is orthogonal to one betweenan environment (outer) and an organism (inner). Nevertheless the dis-tinction between primary and secondary experience is the basis for anaccount of representation in the sense that theories represent facts. Con-sequently, issues concerning truth and the like would have more to dowith correspondences between two kinds of organism/environment inter-action (both of which are equally accessible) and not so much betweenan inner mind and an outer world (each by itself being mysterious andessentially inaccessible by all current accounts).

Figure 3 depicts a second ninety-degree shift away from a simpleinner/outer distinction, pertaining in this case to the directedness ofexperiences (in the count sense of the term). The breakdown/resolutiondistinction that determines the direction of an experience is thus or-thogonal to each of the former two distinctions. (View Figure 3 as beingrotated ninety degrees into and out of the page from Figure 2.)

Intentionality (at least as immediately occurrent directedness towardan inexistent object; not in every sense of aboutness, e.g., in the sensethat representations of facts are about facts) may be identified withthis directedness of experience with regard to a maladjusted situationin need of resolution—such that the ongoing course of experience tendsto be both situated and episodic in nature, always involving primaryexperience (driven by instinctual, habitual responses to discordant cir-cumstances) and often involving secondary experience (proceeding asdeliberate reflective regulative inquiry) in various efforts to regain somekind of equilibrium in organism/environment transactions.

Putting all of this together, we obtain the following revised formulaic

‘‘INNER’’ / BRAIN / ORGANISM

‘‘OUTER’’ / EXTERNAL WORLD / ENVIRONMENT

PRIMARY EXPERIENCE SECONDARY EXPERIENCE

Figure 2: one 90◦

shift: primary vs secondary experience.


claim: a pragmatist theory of experience = active externalism + a dual-process theory of primary versus secondary experience + an account ofexperiences as situated, episodic equilibrations + an arrangement of thesethree independent factors into a multi-dimensional epistemological andpsychological framework.

1.2 Two Challenges

The latter formula does not say as much as we should want, though itworks against folk-psychological intuitions if it works at all. There are, ofcourse, two obvious questions about active externalism in particular—two challenges—that highlight what is at issue here: (I) How exactlyare worldly objects or facts inner as well as outer? (II) How exactly arethoughts or theories outer as well as inner? How would a pragmatistanswer these questions?

There are two complimentary ways to reply to these questions (notthat the present paper will pursue either way in any detail). On onehand, we might look to philosophy. On the other hand, we might tryto do some cognitive science. In the first case, besides the works ofJames and Dewey, we could recite numerous well-known arguments andexamples from the philosophical literature in favor of various kinds ofexternalism. This kind of reply should give at least some plausibility toa pragmatist theory of experience.

Question (I) is thus answerable by arguing for a kind of operationalexternalism. Namely, by virtue of the interactive coupling of organismsand their environments, primary experience is operationally projectiveand perspectival [Hanson 1958], [McDowell 1994], [Noë 2004], [Wittgen-

INNER, ETC

OUTER, ETC

‘‘INTENTIONALITY ’’

BR

EA

KD

OW

NR

ES

OL

UT

ION

Figure 3: another 90◦

shift: breakdown and resolution.

196 Tom Burke

stein 1953]. This is not to claim that perception or perceptual facts are“theory-laden.” That is a different point that is specific to perceiverscapable of entertaining “theories” whereas the present point is intendedto cover all perceivers in general. The present point pertains not to theo-retical but to operational perspectivity. The point is that primary expe-rience is laden by operational capabilities, and these capabilities dependas much on the organism’s constitution as on environmental conditionsunder which they are implemented. For instance, perceptual illusionsclearly exemplify ways in which our perceptions are geared (beyond ourdeliberate control) to the workings of our sensory machinery, not solelyto how and what things are independently of our perceiving them. Thus:outer objects are also inner in the sense that their direct presentationin primary experience is a function of the organism as much as of theenvironment.

Question (II) can be addressed using concepts and arguments asso-ciated with semantic externalism [Putnam 1975], [Burge 1979], [Lunt-ley 1999], cognitive externalism [Clark & Chalmers 1998], [Clark 1997],[Clark 2001], [Noë 2004], [Rockwell 2005], and epistemic externalism[Baird 2004], [Hardwig 1985], [Hutchins 1995], [Longino 2006]. Thesearguments will not be recounted here, but their cumulative upshot isthat the supervenience base of secondary experience is extended into theworld beyond brains or body surfaces. This larger supervenience baseincludes spatio-physical structures particularly as they are involved inthe technological, cultural-linguistic, and social-institutional complexesin which those brains and bodies are embedded. Thus: inner thoughtsare also outer in the sense that their direct occurrence in secondaryexperience is a function of the environment as much as of the organism.

On the other hand, one should also respond to questions (I) and (II)by trying to do some cognitive science. The aim in this case is to buildand test working models to try to fathom how far one can run with suchideas. Primary and secondary experience will call for different kindsof modeling techniques that nevertheless must be mutually compatibleand subject to some kind of synthesis. A number of existing researchprograms and modeling techniques may be useful here, though we willonly speculate about such prospects.

In response to question (I): it is not unreasonable to think that pri-mary experience may be modeled (i) using subsumption architectures[Brooks 1990]; (ii) using artificial-life simulations, genetic algorithms,“constrained generating procedures,” and complexity science [Beer &Gallagher 1992], [Clark 1997], [Holland 1998]; more generally, (iii) byway of dynamical systems theory, including but not limited to neural


network or connectionist models [Port & van Gelder 1995], [Clark 1997];or more specifically (iv) drawing on conceptual and methodological as-pects of ecological psychology [Gibson 1979], [Heft 2001]. Regardless ofhow we might employ any of these modeling strategies, the challenge inall such efforts is to model perception and object-recognition processesthat are fast, robust, and reliable.

In particular, if we take the ecological active-externalism premise se-riously, we can only base an account of primary experience on the ideaof elementary ecological interactions of some sort. Ecological psychol-ogy suggests that we start with a primitive notion of active invariant-extraction or invariant-detection as this elementary form of organism/en-vironment interaction. We could construct a generic notion of a programfrom that of invariant-extraction (that is, an atomic program in thissetting would be the implementation of a given invariant-extraction ca-pability so as to extract a specific invariant, or a specific instance of aninvariant, as it were—not unlike an assignment of a value to a variable,though not exactly like it either). We are then able to utilize a respectivemulti-modal dynamic logic to model “computational” features of primaryexperience [Burke 2002]. Perceivable objects (or kinds of perceivable ob-jects, more precisely) would have to be cast in terms of frames or modelsdefined over such logics, thus providing one way to capture the Gibson-ian idea that objects are essentially systemic bundles of affordances. Thefact that the details of such models would be ecological in nature “all theway down” (and all the way up, for that matter) would explain how itis that any perceived object is as much a function of the organism as ofthe environment and hence is as much inner as it is outer.

In response to question (II): it is reasonable to speculate that mod-eling secondary experience would focus especially on the role of lan-guages and cultures in human experience, these being the media of slowand deliberate experience. This emphasis would have to include social-institutional structures (economic, political, etc.) as external sources ofconstraints on individual rational choice [Clark 1997, chap. 9–10], [Satz& Ferejohn 1994].

More generally, this modeling task calls for a thorough reconsider-ation of the nature and role of language in human experience. It willalmost certainly require (i) that we rethink semantics. For example, settheory is not a good place to begin insofar as “objects” are real enoughbut are neither fundamental, elementary, nor primitive, no matter thatthey may be as real as anything is real. But if set theory is suspect,so are traditional (Tarski-style) approaches to semantics, particularly asthe latter are geared to formal languages that (if only intuitively) regard

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nameable objects as ontologically fundamental. The question then ishow to proceed if we instead take invariant-detection capabilities to befundamental and proceed as above with a constructed notion of objectsand kinds of objects. One cannot simply do business as usual so far asformal semantics goes. Focusing on language and culture in models ofsecondary experience similarly requires (ii) that we seriously rethink log-ical syntax. If “objects” are not fundamental, then we should not blindlyadhere to a logical syntax that takes them to be so.

It is also necessary (iii) to rethink pragmatics—for example, to re-construct relevance theory [Sperber & Wilson 1995], first, by dispens-ing with Fodor’s computational theory of mind and opting instead fora pragmatist view informed by Mead’s social psychology [Burke 2005]and, second, by supplementing the idea of relevance with one of utilityso as to accommodate the intentional breakdown/resolution dimensionof experience [Burke ms].

Otherwise, on other fronts, (iv) Lakoff and Núñez [Lakoff & Núñez2000] may help to explain how the present framework can accommodatemathematical cognition, where mathematical ideas are constituted byway of metaphor though they are grounded in bodily activities and thusrooted in primary experience. What is particularly significant abouttheir conception of the role of metaphor in the growth and developmentof mathematical cognition is that it may help to explain the distinctionand connection between primary and secondary experience in general,namely, not as mirroring but as a layering of schematic metaphors, con-stituting a coupling and/or clutch mechanism of sorts (see below).

Also, (v) we might employ models of bounded rationality that focusspecifically on “fast and frugal heuristics” [Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABCResearch Group 1999], [Gigerenzer & Selten 2001], [Clark 1997]. Someof the work being done along these lines may be pertinent to modelingprimary experience directly (for example, catching a fly ball on the run)while other work seems to deal with fast but deliberate choices (forexample, choosing which of two or more gambles one is willing to take).

In any case, (vi) all such modeling has to be informed by evolu-tionary accounts of the emergence not just of symbol-use but of full-fledged compositional languages capable of handling sentences, propo-sitions, concepts, and the like in secondary experience—as opposed tocreatures’ dealing directly with things, kinds, facts, and so on in primaryexperience [Burke 2002], [Burke 2005].

To summarize: We do not have to look far to find existing modelingtechniques that may be used to fill out a pragmatist theory of experience.The one key idea is to take the ecological interactional premise seriouslyand begin with a primitive notion of active invariant-detection. On that


basis we may attempt to apply various modeling strategies so as to clarifyand render testable the pragmatist theory of experience outlined above.

2 (Anti)Realism?

The preceding discussion is only a preliminary survey of strategies onemay use to model and test a pragmatist theory of experience. But clearlya lot of work can be done to try to (in)validate that theory. The remain-ing half of the present paper deals with the less ambitious task of ex-amining realist and antirealist features and commitments of this theory.Historically, a major impetus for a pragmatist theory of experience hasbeen the felt need to avoid long-standing conundrums associated withan apparent chasm between mind and world as envisaged by folk psy-chology. The pragmatist remedy to these conundrums is the use of astrategy by which both facts and theories straddle that apparent chasm.A defense of such a view must answer allegations that it inevitably leadsto idealism, subjectivism, solipsism, or other dire consequences of radicalconstructivism.

We can approach these issues by way of the notion of representa-tion. Representation is of course a key factor in the operations of humanmentality; but it is not at all obvious how best to characterize the rep-resentation relation. The relevant distinction in the present view is onenot between brain versus external world but between secondary versusprimary experience. In the present framework, the latter distinction isthe best if not only way to talk about mind representing the world, orabout thoughts representing facts.

Several points can be made straightaway about the nature of rep-resentation if we cast it as a relation between secondary and primaryexperience. This view suggests that representation is not essentially amirroring relation, and it is something other than the adaptation ofneural systems to environmental conditions. Instead, representation in-volves operational correspondences or couplings between two kinds oforganism/environment interactions and thus between two kinds of adap-tations of neural systems to environmental conditions. As opposed toinner representations mirroring the outer world, the important relationhere is a functional, operational coupling of fast and slow interactiveprocesses. In this view, secondary experience requires the equivalent ofa “clutch mechanism” as part of this coupling, making it possible for oneto disengage from instinctive, habitual transactions with the world andotherwise to slow things down (when possible) in response to trouble-

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some circumstances where we may need to switch gears (as it were) andredirect ongoing activities.

How to account for this disengagement capability as a feature of sec-ondary experience (and thus as characteristic of representation) is notstraightforward, but it has already been suggested above that one ap-proach might be to generalize the conception of metaphorical correspond-ence that Lakoff and Núñez have used to account for the growth anddevelopment of mathematical cognition. For example, at least 43,000years ago humans developed systems of gift-exchange perhaps as a formof favor-tracking or to serve as an external “memory” of kinship relationsor other forms of reciprocal altruism. It is thought that such giving orig-inally may have worked as a kind of insurance or social security amonggroups with limited, precarious, specialized resources, as with presentday !Kung San hunter-gatherer groups in Botswana. The point is thatthe giving or sharing of ostrich-eggshell jewelry, for instance, is a repre-sentation of the giving or sharing of life-sustaining resources in the sensethat (1) the giving of jewelry corresponds metaphorically to the giving oflife-sustaining resources and (2) the giving of jewelry, as a hedge againsthard times, is more or less abstract and symbolic in the sense that itpertains to possible givings of valuable food or water in different not-yet-existent circumstances. Jewelry does not exactly mirror food and water,and the giving of jewelry does not exactly mirror the giving of food orwater; but schematic metaphorical correspondences in such instances inthe way that Lakoff and others characterize such correspondences arenot difficult to imagine [Lakoff & Núñez 2000], [Lakoff & Johnson 1980].The question, of course, is whether (iterations of) this kind of analysiscan serve as the basis for a full many-layered account of representation.

In any case, the claim here is that secondary experience as such allowsus to stop and think (or at least to coast and think) about what is hap-pening in given circumstances and how best to react—versus acting onmere impulse alone. A pragmatist theory of experience thus distinguishesfacts versus theories, things and ideas, and so forth, so as to incorpo-rate these distinctions into a single conception of experience consisting ofan operational coupling of two kinds of experience: fast-and-instinctiveversus slow-and-deliberate. A key point here is that representations con-stitute the warp and woof of slow-and-deliberate secondary experienceand thus are not essential as such to fast-and-instinctive primary experi-ence. Representations bear on primary experience only in the sense thatfeatures of the latter are “represented” in secondary experience (what-ever that may mean) such that the latter may influence the course of


primary experience.

Obviously, this account construes the representation relation as beingorthogonal to an organism/environment distinction. It is instructive tocontrast this view with Quine’s holism [Quine 1951]. Specifically, Quine’sbrand of holism fails to accommodate a perspective whereby various epis-temological distinctions are orthogonal to a physical-spatial inner/outerdistinction. The central and peripheral parts of a Quinean “web of belief”correlate exactly with what is inside versus outside the brain, with expe-rience being characterized in terms of irritations of nerve endings at theinterface between the two [Quine 1960], [Quine 1981]. Quine’s metaphorsinvolving webs of belief and man-made fabrics of science clearly illustratea common problem with many treatments of realism/antirealism issues,whether one espouses metaphysical realism, scientific realism, epistemo-logical constructivism, conventionalism, irrealism, or what have you. Itis the problem, again, of uncritically assuming a folk-psychological per-spective that (1) positions mind, ideas, theories, beliefs, and the likeinside the head, (2) places the world, things, facts, reality, and suchoutside the head, and (3) casts experience as some kind of flow of in-formation from the latter to the former by way of various orifices andmembranes at the head’s and/or body’s extremities.

Alternatively, a pragmatist theory of experience explicitly rejects thelatter folk-psychological perspective and therefore lies nowhere in thestandard spectrum of positions one may take on realism/antirealism is-sues. Nevertheless it bears some kind of relation both to metaphysicalrealism and to radical constructivism given that it attempts to accom-modate what is right in either extreme view while avoiding the pitfallsof a schizoid folk psychology. We would want to say that a pragma-tist theory of experience is in some sense both constructivist and realistrather than neither, though it is neither if one insists that realism andconstructivism are absolutely and irrevocably inconsistent with one an-other. The positive claim that a pragmatist theory of experience is bothconstructivist and realist is, of course, the more interesting of the twopositions one might take in this regard.

2.1 Constructivism

Constructivist aspects of a pragmatist theory of experience are fairly ob-vious consequences of the fact that it is a dual-process theory of primaryand secondary experience that turns the fact/theory distinction nine-ty degrees sideways so as to be orthogonal to a biophysical inner/outer

202 Tom Burke

distinction. In this view, to check theories against facts (ideas againstthings, mind against the world) is to check one (slow) kind of experienceagainst another (fast) kind of experience. Thus, on one hand, thingsand facts are involuntary upshots of primary experience, whereas ideasand theories are products of a different (secondary) kind of experience—requiring more recently evolved experiential capabilities that are rule-based, controlled, and deliberate.

Again, the notion that facts are “theory-laden” is not the crucialpoint here. Rather, we should first note that facts and objects in them-selves are necessarily constituted in part by the automatic, instinctive,impulsive ways in which we access the world. That facts (as products ofprimary experience) are practice-laden is the fundamental sense in whicha pragmatist theory of experience leans toward constructivism.

Notice, nevertheless, that facts (things, realities) are indeed brutefacts (things, realities), being what they are independently of what wemay think them to be, even if they would not be independent of ourmodes of primary experience. This is a rather weak form of constructiv-ism that is not unpalatable if one can appreciate the robustness of theepistemic objectivity that it allows.

The different issue of how and whether hypotheses and theories (asfeatures of secondary experience) bear on the reality or non-reality ofthe entities they make claims about, whether observable by “unaided”perceptual capabilities (e.g., rocks) or not (e.g., electrons), is a recurrentpractical issue that nevertheless should not present particularly deepphilosophical mysteries. There is after all not a huge difference in prin-ciple between rocks and electrons insofar as instances of either of thesekinds of things are present to our perceptual systems only as they arefiltered through perceptual activities. We might try to peer behind thisveil of practices into an alleged bare reality of things, but we would thenlose any grasp of what a given thing may be as a real object insofaras it has any accessible bearing on us. It is as if the sensible effects ofperceptual practices constitute a veil in which reality is shrouded butsuch that what is behind the veil immediately evaporates in the veryact of lifting that veil. For a pragmatist theory of experience, if sensibleeffects of preceptual practices indeed constitute a veil, then attendingto the fabric and flux of this veil in reactive contact with the world isprecisely how we discern the contours of reality. This veil is not to belifted but rather pressed, prodded, and molded against anything thatoffers resistance, whether the results be rocks, electrons, or whatever.

Of course, quite a bit more theory accompanies experiences of elec-trons than that of rocks, for most of us, which is to say that our ex-


periences of electrons are considerably more theory-laden than are ourexperiences of rocks. The fact that this difference is so pronounced mayseem to support a kind of instrumentalism which holds that electrons“exist” only to the extent that they work within this or that theory ofphysics or chemistry (and that is all that need be said about their onto-logical status). But this ignores the fact that the last one hundred yearsof science and technology has rendered their sensible effects so familiarin primary experience—so that they “work” concretely within primaryexperience, not just formally within this or that theory—that we regardelectrons as somehow real independently of any particular theory or evenindependently of admitting that our current theories are probably inad-equate. Ultimately we may be wrong in thinking them to be real in thisway (as happened, for instance, with “celestial spheres”); but for nowthere is no point in insisting that they are only useful fictions—just asthere would be no point in saying such a thing about rocks.

2.2 Realism

To question whether a pragmatist theory of experience is realist or notpresupposes some prior effort to clarify what is meant by “realism” inthe first place. In particular, the style of realism that is compatible witha pragmatist theory of experience is significantly constrained by the factthat an active-externalist ninety-degree-shifted dual-process theory ofexperience cannot reasonably regard “things” or “objects” as primitivedenizens of an external universe. The idea of a “thing-in-itself” indepen-dent of primary experience is vaguely meaningful but largely useless here.Likewise, the question-begging practice of taking domains of first-orderquantification to be domains of things (with the full-fledged ontologicalcommitments this is supposed to entail) is especially questionable—inwhich case the entire edifice of mathematical logic in its present formbecomes suspect.

A pragmatist theory of experience and its consequent style of realismhave to be formulated and otherwise grounded in some other way. Theway to do it, again, is to take seriously the active-externalist assumption,literally, that neither primary nor secondary experience can be locatedexclusively inside or outside the head. Each kind of experience occursrather in a field of inner/outer (organism/environment) interactions, thepoint being that any primitive elements to which we might appeal inpsychological modeling must be elementary modes of such interaction.Anything else will almost certainly slippery-slide us back into some formof folk psychology.

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As outlined earlier, “objects” or “things” in this view are easily accom-modated as instances of kinds. Kinds, in turn, may be cast as (classesof) models of multi-modal dynamic logics based on the notion of ele-mentary programs as implementations of invariant-detection abilities.There are, of course, “easy” problems of primary experience as well asthe “hard” what-it’s-like problem of primary experience, and this way ofcomputationally modeling primary experience only addresses the easyproblems. But this theory is clearly not idealist or otherwise radicallyanti-realist insofar as (1) the constitution of “kinds” depends on regu-larities in the external world as much as on established abilities of theorganism, where (2) neither of these two factors depends in any essentialway on how or what the experiencer does or might think. The notionthat facts are necessarily constituted in part by the world that we oftenaccess in automatic and yet reliable ways is the fundamental sense inwhich a pragmatist theory of experience is realist.

Further details are hard to summarize, especially since they have yetto be worked out to any acceptable degree. But if elementary modes ofinteraction are indeed where we should ground a pragmatist theory ofexperience, any elaboration of details would have to include a number ofthings that have already been mentioned or else are clear consequencesof what has been discussed so far.

In particular, state-of-the-art physics and biology, on their own terms,will always set the stage informally (or meta-theoretically) for how wedistinguish organisms versus environments and thus how we characterizeso-called active externalism. Of course, this stage-setting will always betentative. Fortunately there are bodies of physical and biological factsand concepts (that the earth is more or less spherical, that the gravita-tional constant at place X is such and so, etc.) that, regardless of thefate of various cutting-edge developments, will pretty much remain in-tact and thus provide a stable vocabulary for talking about what is insideand outside of brains and heads, at least in physical and/or biologicalterms. Be that as it may, the cognitive sciences do not fall squarelywithin the purview of physics and/or biology. We are thus going be-yond mere physics or biology when we draw on ecological psychology asa way of modeling primary experience. In particular, elementary modesof interaction and thus primitive features of primary experience wouldbe characterized generically as abilities to extract or detect invariant in-formation in the midst of ambient fluxes of activity; and each instance ofsuch detection has an elusive what-it’s-like quality that escapes merelyphysical or biological explanation. In this basic sense, it is fairly clearthat we are already assuming something like a live creature as an agent


capable of having experiences in which qualitative invariant-detectionplays a fundamental role.

We have also seen, at least briefly, how to give an account of thingsor objects in primary experience as instances of ecological systems ofaffordances. Of courses, affordances are always affordances for one oranother live creature. Any manner of modeling primary and secondaryexperience, to be successful, must be able to make sense of this notion ofaffordances, especially if the latter is the key to making sense of objectsand kinds of objects. The claim here is not that things or objects do notactually exist but only that they are not suitable as psychological (orlogical/semantic) primitives when regarded as being wholly independentof any particular perceiving agent. An object or substance that we regardas debris may be perceived as nutriment by some other creature. Thatone-and-the-same stuff, if it is real at all, is fully real. But what it isreal as depends essentially on who is perceiving it. At the same time,the fact that it is compost material to a given human being and the factthat it is food to a given earthworm are two equally factual facts. Forthis reason alone, a pragmatist theory of experience does not easily lenditself to nominalism insofar as there are no objects to speak of except asinstances of kinds; and there are no kinds, for that matter, except withrespect to this or that live creature.

It may help to compare this affordance-based notion of facticity withthe formal-semantical notion that sentences are not simply true or falseabsolutely but are only true-in-a-model or false-in-a-model. This rela-tivization of truth to models in no way weakens the notion of truth butonly clarifies what it means to say that a claim is true. The idea ofrelativizing object-hood and kind-hood to specific living organism/envi-ronment systems is a more complicated idea in need of substantial clari-fication; but it is designed not to compromise the notions of actuality orfacticity but to clarify what it means to say that a given object actuallyexists or that a given possible fact is indeed an actual fact. That is whatthe notion of affordances is all about.

We should also keep in mind as well that the preceding discussion is tobe couched within a theory of experience that accommodates the situatednature of experiences as episodes of resolution of breakdowns. Objectsoccur as instances of this or that kind only as they might occur in suchsituations, or so the theory goes. Something worth noting here is the factthat such situations are not locatable anywhere except within fields ofinteractions that constitute living organism/environment systems. Situ-ations initially are breakdowns or maladjustments in such interactions.

206 Tom Burke

It is only in that sense that they are “parts of the world.” Neverthelessthey are indeed parts of the world, not just subjective states.

The bottom line is that a pragmatist theory of experience is realisticin the sense of Gibsonian ecological psychology—not so much with regardto individuals or universals in any traditional sense, but with regard toambient fields of organism/environment interactions and to engrainedabilities of respective live creatures to detect invariants in the flux ofthose interactions and thereby to perceive things as systemic bundlesof affordances. Such things are indeed as real as anything gets. Butrealism/antirealism issues have been recast in such a way that invariant-extraction abilities are what a pragmatist theory of experience may taketo be fundamental and thus what it may take to be fundamentally real.Perhaps the more important point is not just that we can attribute realityto what we take to be fundamental but rather that a pragmatist theoryof experience calls for different commitments as to what we should taketo be fundamental.

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