Abstract
The second half of my metaphysical backdrop concerns the nature of appearances, which is the topic of this chapter. I argue on metasemantic grounds for a factive conception of appearances (according to which if it appears to be the case that p, then p), but I also argue against a layered conception of reality that would stratify such appearances as a less-than-fully-real portion of the world. The distinction between mere truths and perspicuous truths, sketched in the previous chapter, will lead to a less inflationary characterization of the realm of appearances. After some observations on the notion of truth itself, the relation between reality and appearances will be discussed, primarily in the form of the explanatory relations that philosophers can posit to explain appearances in terms of reality. Some inkling of the methodology of metaphysics will be offered.
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Notes
- 1.
There also is an epistemic reading of metaphysical perspicuity that is mostly unintended on the present account: a perspicuous sentence is one whose logical structure gives us epistemic access to the structure of reality; I suspect that there are shades of this epistemic reading of perspicuity in the Logical Atomist’s notion of a “logically ideal language” and the corresponding propositions.
- 2.
Of course, to the extent in which Eddington was trying to divulge recent scientific results to a wider audience, which may or may not have possessed the conceptual tools to understand such results as they had been formulated, such an intermingling was somewhat unavoidable. But in such cases, one should preface such simplifications and analogies by disclaiming that they are loose talk, helpful tools for the uninitiated – but they should not be taken literally. During dissemination, we sometimes omit such disclaimers to preserve emotional impact (after all, one must be in a very impressionable state of mind to believe that stepping on a wooden plank is like stepping on a swarm of flies).
- 3.
A crucial point about Hirsch’s argument must be noted. The argument scheme of which (K1)–(K4) is an instance does not always produce true conclusions, because the premises are not always true. We circle back to what may be (or may have been) another ordinary belief, viz. that there is a Loch Ness monster. The following sentence is false:
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(N1) The most charitable interpretation of English is one on which “there is a Loch Ness monster” comes out as true
That (K1) is true, while (N1) is false signals one important fact: considerations of charity must allow for the possibility of error. When someone, perhaps very gullible townsfolk utter “there is a Loch Ness monster”, nothing in their linguistic or extra-linguistic behaviour indicates that they are using those expression but in the most ordinary sense; with “Loch Ness monster” they clearly mean a monstrous creature that lives in the lake, and with “there is” they clearly mean the same thing they mean when they claim “there is beer in the fridge”. And yet, on that interpretation, the sentence comes out as false. According to Hirsch (2002), this has to do with the fact that charity maximizes rationality – not truth. The most charitable interpretation is one that makes the subject the most rational with respect to its linguistic and extra-linguistic behaviour; but that doesn’t mean that their utterances are automatically true – for example, if some empirical data is still missing. Here is therefore a crucial difference between the job of the metaphysician and that of an explorer: the latter, but not the former, is involved in gathering new empirical data. This means that interpretive constraints based on ordinary use can shield ordinary beliefs from the metaphysician, but not the explorer.
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- 4.
Amongst others, one might doubt that Schaffer’s (2010) priority monism is in the business of claiming that only the whole – viz. the entire cosmos – is real.
- 5.
The same move is possible, as hinted in the previous chapter, for truthmaking as well – thus this discussion also applies, ceteris paribus, to deflated truthmaking.
- 6.
- 7.
That such matters-of-facts are not, on the operationalist perspective, reified into heavyweight facts, does not mean that we cannot express the separation between more fundamental and less fundamental matters-of-facts; for this purpose we can use, as I will do at length in the course of this book, a notion of generalized identity. I leave this exercise for another time.
- 8.
There seems to be some agreement that metaphysical grounding is internal (for a critical take on the subject, see Litland, 2015); in fact, according to Bennett (2011, p. 32) grounding is super-internal, in the sense that the intrinsic nature of the grounding entity is sufficient to establish the existence of the grounded and the holding of the relation between them. In that case, a whole lot more needs to be said about the nature of the supposedly “real” entities which is ultimately responsible for the whole real/apparent infrastructure. Incidentally, this topic is related to a very important discussion concerning meta-grounding or meta-explanatory questions, which I will discuss in Chap. 8.
- 9.
My worry loosely resembles Oliver’s (1996, p. 31, fn. 30) doubts with Armstrong’s (1996, p. 12) famous claim that “[w]hat supervenes is no addition to being”: “[s]ince supervenient entities exist and are not identical to the entities upon which they supervene, they must be an ontological addition.” The crucial problem there was that the supervenient and its base are numerically distinct, thus making Armstrong’s claim poorly motivated. A similar dilemma has in fact been proposed for grounding as well, which is occasionally taken to entail reduction-as-identity (Rosen, 2010). E.g. Audi (2012, p. 110) claimed that, to the extent in which reduction, or nothing-over-and-aboveness (a close cousin of Armstrong’s no-addition-to-beingness) has to be cashed out in terms of identity, and to the extent that grounding is asymmetric, the grounded is in fact something over and above what is doing the grounding. So one might ask: why does the grounded not deserve the metaphysician’s respect? And, similarly any declaration that a grounded entity which is numerically different from its grounding base is still nothing over and above that base incurs in the same problem; see Trogdon’s (2013, p. 113–114) discussion on Schaffer’s proposal. Some options have it better in this regard; e.g. Azzouni’s (2012) take on grounding according to which derivative entities do not effectively exist. Solutions which radically revise the logical form and/or formal properties of grounding (Jenkins, 2011) come closer to positions I will espouse in this book. More below.
- 10.
Again, see Rayo (2013, p. 10–11).
- 11.
Anti-realists about structure will perhaps claim that, metaphysically speaking, there is no difference between “it’s storming” and “there is a storm”, and that object-talk is only employed for its semantic virtues; see Rayo (2013, p. 13).
- 12.
For a laudable effort, see Devitt (1996).
- 13.
Wouldn’t the members of the alien tribe find other supposed “explanations” illuminating? Absolutely. I will come back to this point shortly.
- 14.
For a recent investigation, see Lange (2016).
- 15.
Although it is not always easy to separate discussions of (certain) non-causal explanations from discussions of metaphysical grounding, in favour of the asymmetry of explanation see Raven (2013, p. 193–194); against it, Bliss (2014) and Thompson (2016); for irreflexivity, see Trogdon (2013, p. 106), and against it Jenkins (2011); for transitivity, Raven (2013, p. 193–194), and against it Schaffer (2012). Rodriguez-Pereyra (2015) argues against all three. In favour of non-monotonicity, see Rosen (2010, p. 116), Trogdon (2013, p. 109), and Dasgupta (2014a, p. 4). For an up-to-date overview of this topic, Maurin (2019).
- 16.
Again, to anticipate things from later chapters, I take the only out-there component of constitutive explanation is generalized identity.
- 17.
The reader may notice that I have presented two criteria for realism about explanation: the first one, based on joint-carvingness and perspicuity; and the second one, based on Kim’s passage. I don’t think that they are in competition; they are rather complementary. Roughly put, the existence of an “objective correlate” to explanation, in Kim’s words, may very well amount to the presence of a pattern of objective similarities signalled by the use of a “because” expression, if we assume that 핊(because).
- 18.
One may believe my irrealism to be a source of difficulty when characterizing explanation and its formal features; after all, many features of causal explanations are understood vicariously through the study of the formal features of causation itself. And so, that there are no out-there relations for a non-causal explanation to track may make the job harder. I disagree: for even if there was, pace me, an out-there grounding aspect of reality, how would we know of its properties? The only access to it, it would seem, is through the association with our ordinary concept of explanation; on this topic, see Maurin (2019).
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Azzano, L. (2024). Appearance. In: Dispositional Reality. Synthese Library, vol 482. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52625-1_3
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