Where Are (Mind-Independent) Facts? (original) (raw)
Speaking of Facts: or, Reality without Realism
Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2024
This paper provides a concise overview and summary of the positions on facts, events, and realism in the philosophy of history as developed in my work. This summary is then used to clarify and resolve confusions on these points found in various essays contained in the volume The Poverty of Anti-Realism.
In these most fundamental matters of metaphysics, definitions are impossible." 2 Regarding facts, properties, and relations, he held -with especial verve in a later book,
Facts, Factives, and Contra-factives
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume , 2017
Frege begins his discussion of factives in ‘On Sense and Reference’ with an example of a purported contra-factive, i.e. a verb that entails the falsity of the complement sentence. But the verb he cites, ‘wähnen’, is now obsolete, and native speakers are sceptical about whether it really was a contra-factive. Despite the profusion of factive verbs, there are no clear examples of contra-factive propositional attitude verbs in English, French or German (or indeed any other Indo-European languages). This paper attempts to give an explanation of why there are no contra-factives, and to use this to shed light on the behaviour of factives more generally. The suggestion is that factive propositional attitude verbs take facts, not propositions, as the referents of their complement sentences; and that as there are no contra-facts (merely false propositions), there can be no contra-factives. This claim is then used to help explain Timothy Williamson’s observation that knowledge is the weakest stative propositional attitude factive.
Wittgenstein and Necessary Facts
A long philosophical tradition in modern philosophy, stemming from Kant, holds that necessary features of the world are a by-product of our conceptual scheme (or schemes): we regard as necessary what we could not experience, or conceive, or linguistically describe as being otherwise.
Can Knowledge Really be Non-factive?
Logos & Episteme, 2021
This paper contains a critical examination of the prospects for analyses of knowledge that weaken the factivity condition so that knowledge implies only approximate truth.
ProtoSociology
Facts are structures which are the case, and they are what true sentences affirm. It is a fact that Fido barks. It is easy to list some of its components, Fido and the property of barking. It is hard to say what the structure is (the glue is a notoriously tricky element), but happily this is not relevant for the present purpose. Intuitively, any sentence which refers to just these components, attributing barking to Fido, will affirm the same fact. By some standards, if Fido is the smartest dog on Elm Street, a sentence like "the smartest dog on Elm Street barks" meets this condition, and so also affirms the fact that Fido barks. This immediately provokes some uneasiness. Does not Elm Street have a claim to be a component of any fact which the more complex sentence affirms? More generally, should we qualify the intuition, so that it claims only that a sentence which refers just to Fido and the property of barking, and to nothing else, will affirm the fact that Fido barks? This question touches one central strand of Stephen Neale's subtle monograph. In a form which comes a little closer to the generality at which Neale's argument operates, a challenge to the very idea of facts can be made as follows: if a definite description "the F" refers at all, then it refers to the same thing as "the thing which is both F and p", for any true sentence "p". There is thus no upper limit to the additional material, up to a complete description of the world, that can be incorporated into a definite description. The conflicting intuitions are: (i) that all that matters to what fact is affirmed is what the definite description refers to; and (ii) that the extraneous material cannot be guaranteed to have no effect on which fact is affirmed. In light of the challenge, it is not surprising that Neale should applaud those fact theorists who, like Russell, denied that definite descriptions are referring expressions, thus cutting off the challenge before it can be so much as issued.
JF 2018 "Ultimate" facts? Zalabardo on the Metaphysics of Truth
A comment on José Zalabardo's forthcoming treatment of the origins of the Tractatus picture theory in Wittgenstein's reactions to Russell's multiple relation theory of judgment. Forthcoming in a special issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review, probably mid-2019. This is a penultimate version.
AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATION OF FACT AND TRUTH
The "problem of Truth" in propinquity with "fact" has had a chequered career, especially in the last hundred years. In the philosophies of men like Bradley, Bosanquet, and Royce, it occupied a central position. 1 The coherence theory of truth, in various forms and formulations, was at least the corner stone and perhaps the foundation of one kind of idealism. The "realist and "pragmatist" revolts against that philosophy were carried on in important respects, with ammunition derived, in the first case, form a return to more "traditional epistemological" "correspondence" theories and, in the second, from a major rethinking of the problem of "truth" with regards to "fact." 2