This essay is a plea for ideological toleration. Philosophers are right to be fussy about the words they use, especially in metaphysics where bad vocabulary has been a source of grief down through the ages. But they can sometimes be too fussy, dismissing as 'unintelligible' or 'obscure' certain forms of language that are perfectly meaningful by ordinary standards and which may be of some real use. So it is, I suggest, with certain idioms of metaphysical determination and dependence. We say that one class of facts depends upon or is grounded in another. We say that a thing possesses one property in virtue of possessing another, or that one proposition makes another true. These idioms are common, as we shall see, but they are not part of anyone's official vocabulary. The general tendency is to admit them for heuristic purposes, where the aim is to point the reader's nose in the direction of some philosophical thesis, but then to suppress them in favor of other, allegedly more hygienic formulations when the time comes to say exactly what we mean. The thought is apparently widespread that while these ubiquitous idioms are sometimes convenient, they are ultimately too 'unclear', or too 'confused', or perhaps simply too exotic to figure in our first-class philosophical vocabulary. Against this tendency, I suggest that with a minimum of regimentation these metaphysical notions may be rendered clear enough, and that much is to be
Two QuestionsThe problem of nominalism-Do abstract objects exist?-is a problem in metaphysics. But no one knows how to approach this problem directly. Rather in this case as in so many cases in contemporary philosophy, we approach the metaphysical question via a correlative question in epistemology. Instead of asking whether abstract entities in fact exist, we ask whether we are justified in believing that they do.My aim in what follows is to clarify this epistemological question and its relation to the metaphysical debate. The most important thing to note is that the epistemological question is ambiguous in a sense in which the metaphysical question is not. Some of the ambiguities are quite subtle; indeed we lack a suitably nuanced vocabulary for sorting them out. But let's begin with what ought to be an elementary distinction.When we ask whether we are justified in believing that abstract objects exist, we might be asking whether we are rationally entitled to believewhether a commitment to abstract things is rationally permissible for us. But we might also be asking whether we are rationally obliged to believe: whether it would be positively unreasonable to reject abstract objects or to suspend judgment on their existence.These are clearly different questions: as different as the difference between 'must' and 'may': and in my opinion, they have different answers. In what follows I shall try to make it plausible that while a commitment to abstract objects is rationally permissible for us, no such commitment is obligatory. It is rationally permissible, in other words, both to believe that abstract entities exist, and to suspend judgment on their existence and perhaps even to reject them altogether. (Nota bene: If these were the answers to the only relevant epistemological questions concerning nominalism, then an epistemological inquiry would leave the original metaphysical question unresolved. You can learn that it's all Philosophical Perspectives, 15, Metaphysics, 2001
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.