Abstract

The dissertation is a philosophical and historical study of the notion of a fact. ;In Chapter One, I maintain that it is essential to this notion that it refer to something independent of language and thought: it belongs to metaphysics, not semantics. One lesson to be drawn from this is that facts differ from propositions--even true ones--more than is generally supposed. I note that facts appeared late on the philosophical stage and offer an explanation connecting facts and relations. ;Chapter Two develops this theme further. I show how the traditional substance-attribute metaphysics had trouble accommodating relations. I trace the notion of the 'foundation' of a relation in scholastic and nineteenth-century philosophy, culminating in the identification of such foundations with facts. The idea is that the reality of a relation, such as that holding between a hen and a chick, consists in some concrete fact about the terms, such as the one's having laid an egg out of which the other was hatched. ;In Chapter Three, I consider Bradley's regress argument. I show that it is an argument in favour of facts and not against relations as commonly supposed. ;Chapter Four concerns the argument Barwise and Perry refer to as 'the slingshot'. In the first part, I argue that it, rather than any puzzle about identity, is responsible for Frege's distinction between sense and reference. In the second part, I distinguish two conceptions of facts and show that they yield different analyses of the argument. I give reasons for preferring one of these conceptions