Fundamental and Derivative Truths

Mind 119 (473):103 - 141 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article investigates the claim that some truths are fundamentally or really true — and that other truths are not. Such a distinction can help us reconcile radically minimal metaphysical views with the verities of common sense. I develop an understanding of the distinction whereby Fundamentality is not itself a metaphysical distinction, but rather a device that must be presupposed to express metaphysical distinctions. Drawing on recent work by Rayo on anti-Quinean theories of ontological commitments, I formulate a rigourous theory of the notion. In the final sections, I show how this package dovetails with ' interpretationist' theories of meaning to give sober content to thought that some things — perhaps sets, or gerrymandered mereological sums — can be 'postulated into existence'

Similar books and articles

Truths, facts and values.Lloyd Reinhardt - 2007 - Philosophy 82 (4):625-641.
Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics.Douglas Kutach - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press.
A Distinction between Science and Philosophy.Nathan Sinclair - 2011 - Essays in Philosophy 12 (2):241-252.
Getting priority straight.Louis deRosset - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (1):73-97.
The uses and abuses of the personal/subpersonal distinction.Zoe Drayson - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):1-18.
Analyticity Again.Jerry Fodor & Ernie Lepore - 2006 - In Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 19--114.
The philosophy of logic.Penelope Maddy - 2012 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 18 (4):481-504.
How to Be a Truthmaker Maximalist.Ross P. Cameron - 2008 - Noûs 42 (3):410 - 421.
Metaphysical Motives of Kant’s Analytic–Synthetic Distinction.Desmond Hogan - 2013 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (2):267-307.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
812 (#17,657)

6 months
88 (#45,738)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Robert Williams
University of Leeds

Citations of this work

Fundamentality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Identity.Harold Noonan & Benjamin L. Curtis - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In Defence of Ground.Michael J. Raven - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (4):687 - 701.
Emergence and Fundamentality.Elizabeth Barnes - 2012 - Mind 121 (484):873-901.
Ontological Innocence.Katherine Hawley - 2014 - In A. J. Cotnoir & Donald L. M. Baxter (eds.), Composition as Identity. Oxford University Press. pp. 70-89.

View all 36 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Does conceivability entail possibility.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 145--200.
From a Logical Point of View.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1953 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
Material beings.Peter Van Inwagen - 1990 - Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

View all 55 references / Add more references