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Should Metaphysics Care About Linguistics?

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Abstract

Naturalized metaphysics is based on the idea that philosophy should be guided by the sciences. The paradigmatic science that is relevant for metaphysics is physics because physics tells us what fundamental reality is ultimately like. There are other sciences, however, that de facto play a role in philosophical inquiries about what there is, one of them being the science of language, i.e. linguistics. In this paper I will be concerned with the question what role linguistics should and does play for the metametaphysical question of how our views about fundamental reality can be reconciled with the everyday truisms about what there is. I will present several examples of two kinds of approaches to this question, linguistics-based accounts and purely philosophical accounts, and will discuss their respective methodological merits and shortcomings. In the end I will argue that even proponents of a purely philosophical answer to the metametaphysical question should take the results of linguistics seriously.

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Notes

  1. For an overview over some recent answers to this question, see Chalmers et al. (2009).

  2. If some metaphysical considerations, or maybe some results from physics, should lead us to conclude that at the fundamental level of reality there are no macro-physical objects but only subatomic particles that are arranged in certain ways (cf. Dorr 2005; Sider 2011, 2013a), or perhaps that there are in fact no individual objects at all but only fields or structure (cf. Ladyman and Ross 2007), then an error theory would tell us that no claims about objects like molecules, narwhales or populist politicians are true, let alone those about numbers of merely possible objects (although they may be acceptable as a façon de parler, i.e. ‘correct’ but not true in the sense of Sider 2011, 249). As far as the aims of this paper are concerned I have no objections against such an error theory although, as many others, I find error theories rather unattractive and have doubts that anybody can seriously believe for more than a minute that their cats, spouses or children do not exist. Note that linguistics is also relevant for the error theorist because she is typically not only interested in the truth values of the target sentences but also in their truth conditions. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.).

  3. For the following see Yablo (2006, 2014).

  4. For the following see Hofweber (2005a, b, 2007, 2016).

  5. Cf. Williamson (1998, 2013), who uses sentences like (3) for arguing for necessitism, i.e. the view that necessarily everything is necessarily identical to something. Of course, there have been proposals for actualist paraphrases of sentences such as (3) (cf. for example Fine 1985). The problem with these proposals is not so much that they cannot deal with (3), but rather that their account cannot be transferred to quantification over possibilia that uses generalized quantifiers or quantifies over uncountably many of them (see Fritz and Goodman 2017 for a detailed discussion).

  6. See Rosefeldt (2017); for type-shifting in general see Partee (1987); for different ways of applying the idea to sentences that we use to speak about kinds of things see Krifka et al. (1995), Chierchia (1998), and Cohen (2007).

  7. Of course, there are many further questions that need to be addressed here. Do all general terms allow us to introduce quantification over kinds of things and what is the explanation if this is not the case? What happens if we introduce a name in order to speak about a person that could originate from the sperm and the egg—does this name then refer to a kind? These questions are addressed in Rosefeldt (2017), but would go beyond the scope of this paper, since the account is used here only for the purpose of illustrating a certain methodology.

  8. Brogaard (2007); for Hofweber’s response to Brogaard see Hofweber (2007); Felka shows that this response is not plausible (cf. Felka 2016).

  9. For this kind of quantification see also Rosefeldt (2008).

  10. There are also some simple arguments for the existence of certain composite objects that do not use this kind of jargon. ‚Peter and Paul have married. So, there is at least one married couple’, for example, could be seen as a simple argument for the existence of couples (cf. Fine 2009). However, I do not see any way to criticise this argument on linguistic grounds.

  11. For the following see Cameron (2008). In Cameron (2010) we find a meta-ontological picture that is more similar to that of Sider and Dorr (cf. the interesting comparison between truth-making proposals and fundamentality in Von Solodkoff and Woodward 2013).

  12. Cf. Cameron (2008, 7): ‘Complex objects are no addition of being because acceptance of their existence does not bring an ontological commitment to them. They are an ontological free lunch—nothing ‘over and above’ the simples that compose them—because the ontology needed to ensure the existence of complex objects is just an ontology of simples. It is true to say that complex objects exist; but that statement does not commit us to any new entities, because what really exists—what grounds the truth of statements concerning the existence of complex objects—are just the simples.’

  13. Fine’s position has a certain similarity to Schaffer's (cf. Fine 2009), but it has to be noted that the key term in Fine’s meta-ontological account is‘reality’ rather than ‘fundamentality’. Fine also wants to stay neutral with respect to the question whether ‘grounds’ in ‘p grounds q’ designates a relation among facts or is rather only a sentential operator.

  14. The following is not directed against a version of Dorr’s and Sider’s conciliatory strategy that is ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that rather than assuming an actual ambiguity of expressions like ‘there are’ and ‘exist’, it suggests that metaphysicians should introduce their own metaphysically loaded existence predicate and quantifiers. For a criticism of the revolutionary strategy see Korman (2015, chap. 6).

  15. For an overview see Sennet (2016).

  16. Mereological nihilists might speak loosely in non-philosophical contexts, or allow themselves to utter useful falsehoods, for example (cf. also the excellent discussion of Dorr’s view in Daly and Liggins 2016). For facts about the behavior of metaphysicians that speak against the ambiguity thesis see Korman (2015, Chap. 5).

  17. It is only toy-ontologese because it assumes that the most fundamental particles are electrons and protons.

  18. Sider is ambivalent about this result. In (2013a) he says that he does not want to fully commit to the meta-semantic claim that we can charitably interpret English sentences about composite objects as being true although he finds it likely that the conciliatory strategy works (Sect. 4). However, at other places he less cautiously claims that he accepts that these English sentences are true (Sider 2013b, 152f.). This is understandable, as many people would find it a rather heavy theoretical burden to assume that most of our ordinary claims are false.

  19. Developmental psychologists have found out that children learn counterfactual reasoning at a relatively late stage of their cognitive development, not before the age of six (cf. Rafetseder et al. 2013, and Rafetseder and Perner 2014).

  20. I also have not argued against a conciliatory strategy like that of Williams (2012), who wants to reconcile the truth of everyday existence claims with a sparse ontology without making any non-standard assumptions about their syntax and semantics. Williams introduces the idea of ‘requirements on reality’ connected with the truth of these claims and allows himself to describe these requirement in fictionalist terms. It would go beyond the scope of this paper to discuss whether he indeed succeeds in bypassing the standard objections against fictionalist accounts in meta-ontology.

  21. Sider (2016) acknowledges that there are substantial metaphysical question that do not concern what is fundamental.

  22. Cf. most importantly Schaffer (2009).

  23. For an overview see Moltmann (forthcoming).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Catharine Diehl, Daniel Dohrn, Martin Lipman, Lisa Vogt, Tobias Wilsch and the participants of the GAP.9-colloquium Meta2physics: Analytic vs. Naturalized Metaphysics for comments on earlier versions of this paper. My special thanks go to two anonymous referees of this journal for the enormous effort they have put into reviewing this paper and for their extremely helpful comments.

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    Tobias Rosefeldt

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Rosefeldt, T. Should Metaphysics Care About Linguistics?. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 161–178 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9386-8

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