G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

The subjects of this thesis are truth, grounding and dependence. The thesis consists of an introduction and five free-standing essays. The purpose of the introduction is not merely to summarize the papers, but to provide a general background to the discussions in the essays. The introduction is divided into four chapters, each of which splits into a number of sections and/or subsections. Chapter 1. concerns the notion of ontological dependence. I start by making a distinction between two different types of (...) ontological dependence and discuss how well these notions deal with a number of philosophical issues. I then go on to consider the role that ontological dependence plays in hierarchies of natural kinds. In Chapter 2., I discuss a related notion, namely that of grounding. I sketch the theoretical framework by specifying the logical form of grounding statements and a set of structural principles that govern grounding. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on some philosophical applications of grounding. Chapter 3. deals with the notion of truthmaking and how it squares with the grounding framework developed in the previous chapter. I present the reader with the so-called Truthmaker Principle, and provide answers to a number of questions that it raises. The fourth and final chapter summarizes the five papers. The six essays are divided into three categories. Paper I deals with the notion of ontological dependence in hierarchies of natural kinds. Paper II concerns the notion of grounding and resemblance orderings among powers. Papers III, IV and V discuss various aspects of truthmaker theory. (shrink)

Theory and Reality is about the connection between true theories and the world. A mathematical framefork for such connections is given, and it is shown how that framework can be used to infer facts about the structure of reality from facts about the structure of true theories, The book starts with an overview of various approaches to metaphysics. Beginning with Quine's programmatic "On what there is", the first chapter then discusses the perils involved in going from language to metaphysics. It (...) criticises contemporary intuition-driven metaphysics, comments on naturalistic approaches, and then presents the main proposition put forward in the thesis: we should base metaphysics on model theory. In chapters 2 to 5, mathematical treatments are given of concepts that we need: theories, metaphysics, necessitation and semantics. These are used in chapters 6 and 7 to prove that, seen from a certain informative view point, any true theory will give rise to an isomorphism between that theory and the world. This conclusion is similar to Wittgenstein's in the Tractatus, but differs in that it places the structural relationship on the level of whole theories, rather than single propositions. (shrink)

Metaphysics has had a long history of debate over its viability, and substantivity. This thesis explores issues connected to the realism question within the domain of metaphysics, ultimately aiming to defend a realist, substantive metaphysics by responding to so-called deflationary approaches, which have become prominent, and well supported within the recent metametaphysical and metaontological literature. To this end, I begin by examining the changing nature of the realism question. I argue that characterising realism and anti-realism through theories of truth unduly (...) places epistemology prior to ontology, and is unwarranted in assuming a non-neutrality between theories of truth and positions within the realism debate. I therefore propose a characterisation of realism and anti-realism understood through truthmaking. This produces a suitable working characterisation of realism that will be used within the remainder of this project. In the second section, I trace the historical influences upon current deflationary approaches to metaphysics, most prominently those of Carnap, and Putnam. I argue that Quine’s supposed attack on Carnap’s anti-metaphysical thought fails, and show how current deflationary thought, most prominently exhibited by Hirsch, came to focus on linguistically derived concerns over the substantivity of metaphysics. In the third section, I outline a number of issues for the deflationist, and defend the coherency and legitimacy of the unrestricted existential quantifier. Focusing on the linguistic aspect of deflationism, I argue that the conception of language that the deflationist relies upon lacks suitable empirical and theoretical support within linguistics and other related domains. Furthermore, I suggest that linguistic analysis in fact supports the claim that the quantifier carries no inherent restrictions. This restores our ability to suitably posit the unrestricted existential quantifier, as a quantifier wherein the domain is only restricted by metaphysically substantive restrictions. Through this, I argue that metaphysics is a substantive domain of discourse. Lastly, I sketch a positive account of how, under an empirically and theoretically justified conception of language, metaphysics can be coherently held to be a realist, substantive enterprise, contra claims that hold that the nature of language inherently prevents metaphysics being considered to be a substantive domain of discourse. (shrink)

This papers discuss the place, if any, of Convention T (the condition of material adequacy of the proper definition of truth formulated by Tarski) in the truth-makers account offered by Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith. It is argued that although Tarski’s requirement seems entirely acceptable in the frameworks of truth-makers theories for the first-sight, several doubts arise under a closer inspection. In particular, T-biconditionals have no clear meaning as sentences about truth-makers. Thus, truth-makers theory cannot be considered as (...) the semantic theory of truth enriched by metaphysical (ontological) data. The problem of truth-makers for sentences about future events is discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that metaphysics is a necessary discipline -- necessary in the sense that all areas of philosophy, all areas of science, and in fact any type of rational activity at all would be impossible without a metaphysical background or metaphysical presuppositions. Because of the extremely strong nature of this claim, it is not possible to put forward a very simple argument, although I will attempt to construct one. A crucial issue here is what (...) metaphysics in fact is -- the nature of metaphysics. The conception of metaphysics which I support could be called Aristotelian, as opposed to Kantian: metaphysics is the first philosophy and the basis of all other philosophical and scientific inquiry. I will argue that this is indeed the most plausible conception of metaphysics. (shrink)