Conventionalism and realism-imitating counterfactuals
Philosophical Quarterly 56 (222):1–15 (2006)
| Abstract | Historically, opponents of realism have argued that the world’s objects are constructed by our cognitive activities—or, less colorfully, that they exist and are as they are only relative to our ways of thinking and speaking. To this realists have stoutly replied that even if we had thought or spoken in ways different from our actual ones, the world would still have been populated by the same objects as it actually is, or at least by most of them. (Our thinking differently could cause some differences in which objects exist, or in what some existing objects are like, but that is another matter.) Yet this reply has repeatedly failed to amount to a decisive objection. For opponents of realism have repeatedly argued, in one way or another, that we construct the world’s objects in just such a way as to render such a counterfactual true. We construct them so as to appear not to be our constructs. Just such a debate is currently underway concerning the properties that are essential to the world’s objects. It is widely agreed, with varying caveats1, that there are such properties—that by virtue of belonging to one or another natural kind, the world’s objects possess certain properties essentially, and have individual careers that last exactly as long as those essential properties are jointly present. But what underlies the status as essential of the properties that are thus essential to objects in the world? The realist answer treats essential status as mind-independent, and assigns it to the way the world works (Elder.. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesCrawford L. Elder (2008). Against Universal Mereological Composition. Dialectica 62 (4):433-454.
James Franklin (2009). Aristotelian Realism. In A. Irvine (ed.), The Philosophy of Mathematics (Handbook of the Philosophy of Science series). North-Holland Elsevier.
Edward N. Zalta (2006). Essence and Modality. Mind 115 (459):659-693.
Cynthia Macdonald (1998). Tropes and Other Things. In Stephen Laurence & Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics. Blackwell.
Crawford L. Elder (1999). Ontology and Realism About Modality. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3):292 – 302.
L. A. Paul (2006). In Defense of Essentialism. Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):333–372.
Bradley Strawser (2011). Rea's Revenge and the Persistent Problem of Persistence for Realism. Philosophia 39 (2):375-391.
Crawford L. Elder (2006). Conventionalism and Realism-Imitating Counterfactuals. Philosophical Quarterly 56 (222):1 - 15.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads15 ( #78,648 of 549,074 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,722 of 549,074 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
