Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion: Toward a Widespread Non-Factualism

by Mark Balaguer

Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion 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 abstract-object question and the composite-object question. (More specifically, Mark Balaguer argues that there's no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—ormaterial objects of any other kind.) Second, Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is the view that every metaphysical questiondecomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as 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 the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific questionabout some contingent 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 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 anythingabout reality and, if it's true, isn't made true by reality

Genres: Philosophy

307 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 26, 2021

About the author

Mark Balaguer is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics and Free Will as an Open Scientific Question (MIT Press).