Comment on Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows, on a rolling basis

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:36:13 GMT

Let me start with my slogan-version of my brand of realism: "Things are a certain way. They are not some other way."

I'll admit up front the limits of this slogan. It fails to address at least the following: (1) What are these "things" that are a certain way? (2) What is a "way", of which "things are" one? In particular (3) what is the ontological status of the other ways aside from the "certain way" that "things are"? I don't have fully satisfactory answers to these questions. But the following might make my meaning somewhat more clear.

To your questions:

So physical facts are not contingent. All of them just happen to be independently false or true?

First, let me clear up a possible confusion. I'm using "contingent" in the sense of "not necessarily true or necessarily false". I'm not using it in the sense of "dependent on something else". That said, I take independence, like contingency, to be a theory-relative term. Things just are as they are. In and of themselves, there are no relations of dependence or independence among them.

What then is the status of a theory?

Theories are mechanisms for generating assertions about how things are or would be under various conditions. A theory can be more or less wrong depending on the accuracy of the assertions that it generates.

Theories are not mere lists of assertions (or "facts"). All theories that I know of induce a structure of dependency among their assertions. That structure is a product of the theory, though. (And this relation between the structure and the theory is itself a product of my theory of theories, and so on.)

I should try to clarify what I mean by a "dependency". I mean something like logical dependency. I mean the relation that holds between two statements, P and Q, when we say "The reason that P is true is because Q is true".

Not all notions of "dependency" are theory-dependent in this sense. I believe that "the way things are" can be analyzed into pieces, and these pieces objectively stand in certain relations with one another. To give a prosaic example. The cup in front of me is really there, the table in front of me is really there, and the cup really sits in the relation of "being on" the table. If a cat knocks the cup off the table, an objective relation of causation will exist between the cat's pushing the cup and the cup's falling off the table. All this would be the case without my theorizing. These are facts about the way things are. We need a theory to know them, but they aren't mere features of our theory.

Discuss