Fundamental and Derivative Truths

Mind 119 (473):103 - 141 (2010)
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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'

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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 Aaron J. Cotnoir & Donald L. M. Baxter (eds.), Composition as Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 70-89.

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References found in this work

Does conceivability entail possibility.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. New York: 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.
Objects and Persons.Trenton Merricks - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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