Austere Realism

Abstract

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call “blobjectivism”—the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos (“the blobject”), which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach—products of a decade-long collaboration—will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy.

Radicalization into Violent Extremism I: A Review of Social Science Theories

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More Problems for MaxCon: Contingent Particularity and Stuff-Thing Coincidence

“…I believe they both are. Much work on these issues has come out after the writing of this paper, but before it was published (see Eklund (2008), Horgan and Potrč (2008), Schaffer (2010aSchaffer ( , b, 2009 and Sider (2008a, b). quantifiers' which are different than the normal thing quantifiers, and let us further suppose that there is an as-yet undiscovered but consistent and accurate logic for stuff quantifiers-a logic just as respectable as, and irreducible to, the ordinary quantifier logic. Now, let us suppose that, in the actual world, there is a succession of filled regions which instantiate the property being the Eiffel Tower, and suppose that, there is a correct logical description of the history of the Eiffel Tower that employs only thing quantifiers.…”

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“…If there is just one world out there, i.e. if ontological monism is right, then this has to be called an ontologically austere position (Horgan & Potrč, 2008). The position is ontologically austere just because it does not allow for the existence of the many, thus in that it welcomes the acceptance of ontological monism.…”