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Inquiry & Ordinary Truthmakers

  • Arthur Schipper ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 26, 2022
Metaphysica
From the journal Metaphysica Volume 23 Issue 2

Abstract

This paper argues that accepting an ordinary approach to truthmakers and rejecting something I call “the metaphysical knowledge assumption” (MKA) allows us to account for inquiry in terms of truthmaking. §1 introduces inquiry and the potential place of truthmakers in inquiry. §2 presents the relevant ordinary notion of truthmakers. §3 presents and motivates MKA. This assumption, I argue (§4), makes a truthmaker-focused account of inquiry whose objects are not the fundamental nature of things impossible and thus should be rejected. The ordinary picture, which understands truthmakers not exclusively in terms of the objects of fundamental reality or of semantics (§5), but in terms of the relevant, intentional objects of inquiry, gives us an attractive, general, truthmaker-based view of inquiry.

Keywords: truthmakers; inquiry; intentionality; ontology; ordinary truthmakers
Corresponding author: Arthur Schipper, PhD, MPhil Stud, BA, Assistant Professor, Institute of Foreign Philosophy, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100871, China, E-mail:

Funding source: Peking University

Award Identifier / Grant number: Start-up Fund (Project number: 7100603418)

Acknowledgments

I thank most especially Paul Snowdon for his constant encouragement, guidance, and his comments on many drafts of this paper. I also thank Tim Crane for his inspiration and encouragement; Robert Schipper, Stacie Friend, and Julian Dodd for reading and commenting on earlier drafts; and Göran Sundholm, Christian Skirke, Michael Schmitz, Ivan Ivanov, Kevin Lynch, and Julius Schönherr for walking discussions on related issues. I presented earlier versions of this paper in Vienna at the WFAP Aboutness Workshop, Buenos Aires at the Perspectives on Content ICSO V Workshop, Amsterdam at the Workshop on Propositions, properties, sets, and other abstract objects organised by Thomas Schindler, Al Ain at the UAEU’s invited lectures series, and Beijing at Peking University’s Philosophy and Curiosity lecture series. I thank the organisers for inviting me and the audience members for helpful questions and discussions, including Stephen Yablo, Thomas Schindler, Øystein Linnebo, Sally Haslanger, Nancy Bauer, Mark Richard, Stefano Predelli, Arthur Sullivan, Max Kölbel, Matteo Plebani, Delia Belleri, Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, Simon Langford, Brent Madison, Daniele Mezzadri, Thomas Raleigh, Tim Button, Bahram Assadian, Thomas Hodgson, Leïla Bussière, Julius Schönherr, Chuang Ye, Jiqi Liu, Zhong Konglu, and Yanjing Wang. Stephen Yablo, Matteo Plebani, and Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum later also discussed some relevant ideas with me, to the paper’s benefit, during our 2020 ECAP10 Symposium “Conceptualising Aboutness and Subject Matter” organised by Utrecht University.

  1. Research funding: The author would also like to acknowledge the funding received from Peking University's Start-up Fund (Project number: 7100603418).

  2. Conflict of interest statement: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Published Online: 2022-08-26
Published in Print: 2022-09-26

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Original Papers
  3. In Praise of Externalism? Spaulding, Dewey, and the Logic of Relations
  4. Relations in the Metaphysics of Science
  5. Fictional Universal Realism
  6. Grounding and the Existence of God
  7. Inquiry & Ordinary Truthmakers
  8. Haecceity Mereology
  9. Not Just Many Worlds but Many Universes? A Problem for the Many Worlds View of Quantum Mechanics
  10. The Ontological Distinction between Persons and Their Bodies
  11. A Mental-Physical-Self Topology: The Answer Gleaned From Modeling the Mind-Body Problem
  12. Encoding in Conceivability-Contexts: Zalta’s Theory of Intentionality versus Bourgeois-Gironde’s Notion of Quasi-encoding
  13. Presentism & Passage
  14. Metaphysical Compatibilism and the Ontology of Trans-World Personhood: A Neo-Lewisian Argument for the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge (Determinism) and Metaphysical Free Will
  15. The Question of Transcendence and Constraint in a Panartifactual Account of Being, Knowing and Making
  16. Can Non-Causal Explanations Answer the Leibniz Question?
  17. Two Notes on Composition
  18. Can Causal Powers Cause Their Effects?
  19. A “Nouvelle Métaphysique Thomiste” or Simply Neo-Cayetanism?
https://doi.org/10.1515/mp-2021-0035
Keywords for this article
truthmakers; inquiry; intentionality; ontology; ordinary truthmakers

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Original Papers
  3. In Praise of Externalism? Spaulding, Dewey, and the Logic of Relations
  4. Relations in the Metaphysics of Science
  5. Fictional Universal Realism
  6. Grounding and the Existence of God
  7. Inquiry & Ordinary Truthmakers
  8. Haecceity Mereology
  9. Not Just Many Worlds but Many Universes? A Problem for the Many Worlds View of Quantum Mechanics
  10. The Ontological Distinction between Persons and Their Bodies
  11. A Mental-Physical-Self Topology: The Answer Gleaned From Modeling the Mind-Body Problem
  12. Encoding in Conceivability-Contexts: Zalta’s Theory of Intentionality versus Bourgeois-Gironde’s Notion of Quasi-encoding
  13. Presentism & Passage
  14. Metaphysical Compatibilism and the Ontology of Trans-World Personhood: A Neo-Lewisian Argument for the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge (Determinism) and Metaphysical Free Will
  15. The Question of Transcendence and Constraint in a Panartifactual Account of Being, Knowing and Making
  16. Can Non-Causal Explanations Answer the Leibniz Question?
  17. Two Notes on Composition
  18. Can Causal Powers Cause Their Effects?
  19. A “Nouvelle Métaphysique Thomiste” or Simply Neo-Cayetanism?
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