Modal Nothingism

Chapter 6 is concerned with the following question: What makes modal sentences like ‘There could have been flying saucers’ true?; in particular, what is it about the world, or about Being, that makes them true? This chapter develops and motivates a theory—modal nothingism—that provides a novel answer to this question. Roughly speaking, modal nothingism is the view that (a) modal sentences like the above are true (or substantively true), and (b) there’s nothing about the world (or about Being) that makes them true. Modal nothingism is an important part of the neo-positivist view because it gives neo-positivists a view of modality that’s simultaneously (a) a realist view (i.e. it entails that there are substantive, objective modal truths), and (b) a metaphysically innocent view (i.e. it doesn’t commit to any controversial metaphysical claims—indeed, it doesn’t commit to any claims about the nature of reality at all).

What Is Neo-Positivism and How Could We Argue for It?

Chapter 7 explains how the non-factualist views established in the first part of this book fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism. This chapter formulates neo-positivism, explains why neo-positivism isn’t self-refuting, and explains how we could argue for neo-positivism. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view is that every metaphysical question decomposes into subquestions, and in connection with each of these subquestions, we can endorse one of the following three anti-metaphysical views: non-factualism, scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense captured by the Chapter-6 view modal nothingism.

Widespread Non-Factualism

Chapter 9 briefly explains how we could go about arguing for neo-positivist views of several different metaphysical questions. The chapter focuses mostly on cases in which neo-positivists endorse non-factualist views of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about Aristotelean properties, tropes, coincident objects, essential properties, non-natural moral facts, and certain kinds of facts about grounding and Lewis-Sider-style joints in reality. But the chapter also briefly addresses some cases in which neo-positivists endorse scientistic views, rather than non-factualist views, of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about libertarian free will, non-Humean causation, Lewisian possible worlds, and immaterial Cartesian souls.

A Worldview

Chapter 10 briefly articulates the worldview that’s implied (or at least suggested) by the rest of the book. Very roughly, the idea is that neo-positivists can articulate their worldview with a counterfactual that says something roughly like the following: “If there had been a plenitudinous platonic realm (i.e., a plenitudinous realm of abstract objects like numbers and sets and propositions and so on), and if a certain kind of mereological universalism had been true (in particular, if there had existed a huge plurality of tiny mereological simples and unrestricted compositions of those simples, so that there were, e.g., simples arranged tablewise and catwise and moleculewise and so on, and there were also tables and cats and molecules and trout-turkeys and so on), then quantum mechanics would have been true, and evolution theory would have been true, and Zermelo-Frankel set theory would have been true, and so on.”

How to Be a Fictionalist about Numbers and Tables and Just about Anything Else

Chapter 3 provides a response to a worry about the non-factualist views argued for in this book—in particular, the view that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any abstract objects like numbers or physical objects like planets and tables and electrons. The worry is that these two views imply that our mathematical and scientific theories aren’t true (or that there’s no fact of the matter whether they’re true). This chapter provides a response to this worry by showing how non-factualists can explain what needs explaining about our mathematical and scientific theories—that they’re useful to us, that they seem right to us, and so on—without admitting that they’re true. The explanation proceeds by showing that even if these theories aren’t strictly speaking true, there’s an objective sort of correctness that they possess and that, because of this, they’re for-all-practical­-purposes true.

Non-Factualism about Composite Objects (or Why There’s No Fact of the Matter Whether Any Material Objects Exist)

Chapter 4 provides an argument for a non-factualist view of the composite-object question; i.e., it argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as composite objects like tables and rocks and cats (where a composite object is an object that has proper parts). In addition, this chapter explains how the argument can be extended to establish the much more general (and much more radical) conclusion that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any material objects at all—including mereological simples (i.e., objects that don’t have any proper parts). The argument proceeds by undermining the necessitarian and contingentist views of the composite-object question; so, roughly speaking, the idea is that there isn’t a fact of the matter about the existence of composite objects like tables because there isn’t a necessary fact about this and there also isn’t a contingent fact about it.

Against Trivialism and Mere-Verbalism (and Toward a Better Understanding of the Kind of Non-Factualism Argued for in This Book)

Chapter 2 does two main things. First, it distinguishes the kinds of non-factualist views argued for in this book from two other kinds of anti-metaphysical views, namely, trivialist views and mere-verbalist views. Second, it argues that (a) mere-verbalist views are false, and given this, (b) trivialist views are metaphysically irrelevant in the sense that even if they’re true, they’re metaphysically uninteresting and unimportant. This is important for two different reasons. First, trivialist and mere-verbalist views have been extremely popular among philosophers—they’ve been endorsed by, e.g., Hume, Carnap, Putnam, Dennett, Parfit, van Fraassen, Chalmers, Hirsch, Thomasson, Sidelle, Schiffer, Rayo, and Sosa—and so it’s important to see how my non-factualist views differ from these more popular views. Second, the arguments that I construct for my non-factualist views later in the book depend on the arguments that I give in this chapter for the metaphysical irrelevance of trivialist views.

Non-Factualism about Abstract Objects

Chapter 5 provides an argument for a non-factualist view of the abstract-object question; in other words, it argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects like numbers and sets and propositions (where an abstract object is a non-physical, non-mental, unextended, acausal, non-spatiotemporal object). Roughly speaking, the argument proceeds by showing that the sentence ‘There are abstract objects’ is catastrophically unclear and indeterminate—i.e., that it’s so unclear that it doesn’t have any truth conditions and, hence, doesn’t have a truth value. In addition, the chapter also argues against necessitarian versions of platonism and anti-platonism.

Introduction

Chapter 1 provides a synopsis of the entire book. Roughly speaking, the book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view and argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions—most notably, the question of whether there are any abstract objects and the question of whether there are any composite objects. Second, the book explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view that every metaphysical question decomposes into subquestions, and in connection with each of these subquestions, we can endorse one of the following three anti-metaphysical views: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality.

Conceptual Analysis

Chapter 8 argues that neo-positivists can endorse scientistic views of conceptual-analysis questions—i.e., questions like ‘What is free will?’, ‘What is a person?’, and so on. Very roughly, scientism about a question Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some aspect of physical reality. This chapter argues for scientism about conceptual-analysis questions by arguing that these questions are completely settled by physical-empirical facts about us—in particular, by psychological facts about what we mean by our words. This is an important part of the neo-positivist argument; for in connection with almost all metaphysical questions, one of the main subquestions that neo-positivists need to address is (or is something like) a conceptual-analysis question. So if neo-positivists can endorse scientistic views of all conceptual-analysis questions, then this simplifies things for them considerably (it makes it much easier for them to motivate neo-positivist views of specific metaphysical questions).