Rosja Mastop, June 24, 2011. Some thoughts about metaphysics and real possibility.

Peter van Inwagen [5], in his Stanford Encyclopedia article about Metaphysics, rightly points out that it is dicult if not impossible to nd a common characteristic for everything that we call, or have called, metaphysics. Aware of that problem, I also sympathize with his proposal that the essence of metaphysics consists in an attempt to describe (in a suciently general way) ultimate reality.1 My disagreement with him is that I am not convinced that metaphysics so understood is a meaningful enterprise. Classically, metaphysics deals with the question concerning which kinds of being there are: particular or also universal; physical or also mental; individuals, substances, events, or facts; only that which is actual or also the non-actual but possible; is there a cement of the universe, are there powers; and so on. Answers to these issues, qua descriptions, would certainly be satisfactory for anyone who asked for sucient generality. The relevance (and possibility) of such generality is debatable, but I suppose it is not unimaginable. The real problem is not generality but the appeal to ultimate reality. What is that? I can recognize that there are chairs and tables, cats and dogs, that some things last long and others dont, and so on. Perhaps the rst of these are not general enough and the last is. But what is ultimate or not about them? Here the classical answers are in terms of carving nature by its joints and so on. But that phrase seems to just postulate that there is an ultimate reality to be described rather than answer the question what that means (arguably, as an answer it also suggestively identies ultimate reality with nature). In contemporary analytic philosophy the appeal of formal models is strong. In such models we stipulate domains of basic entities, or sets of them, or relations (sets of ordered pairs) between them, and so on. In that setting, an appeal to metaphysics seems to suggest the idea of an ultimate model, the model of ultimate reality. Existing accordingly means being an entity in the domain of that model. This strengthens the picture of black-and-white issues of which kinds of being exist. Moreover, it implies that there is an ultimate level on which we can assess any identity question whatsoever. Let me explain. Consider, by way of example, the familiar concept of being intentional under some description. I may be intentionally watering the plants but unintentionally thereby be saving my neighbors plants (soaking the ground in which his plants too have roots). As Anscombe [2] argued, in such a case I do not perform two actions only one of which is intentional, but rather I perform one action which is intentional only under the one description but not under the other. Yet, the idea that one and the same action aords dierent descriptions is given another sense entirely (by Davidson [4], as rightly noted by Annas [1]) when it is maintained that actions are completely individuatable, reied, and so actions (or events for that matter) belong to the stock of beings in ultimate reality. The claim that what I am now doing can be described in those dierent ways is weaker (and perhaps more sensible) than the claim that there is an objective answer to any question as to whether two action descriptions are descriptions of the same action. It is one thing to argue for one model (with a single action) as against another (with multiple actions) as a good model for understanding practical reasoning in the particular case. It is a dierent thing to presume that there is a denitive answer to the question how many actions has person X performed throughout her life?. Ultimately the same point applies to events and objects, although it will sound strange to
1 Specically, I think that metaphysics, if done at all, should be concerned with descriptions; not with any sentence that is truth evaluable, but only with those that can reasonably be understood as representations of reality, tting a correspondence account of their truth or falsity. The focus on truth generates all sorts of metaphysical debates regarding moral realism, modal realism and so on, whereas one might wonder as to whether moral and modal utterances should even be regarded as representational or descriptive. Similarly, when I say that the height of a tower is 50 meters, this could be a true statement, but am I then describing the height (property) or the tower? When I call A the cause of B, am I describing something or am I, perhaps, blaming A or explaining B? In short, the descriptive fallacy (Austin [3]) is a real fallacy and is still being committed. Metaphysicians should be concerned, not with truth and reference, but with descriptions and the objects described.

resist reifying objects. Identity questions regarding dierent object-descriptions do not always have a denitive answer. Attempts to nd a way to circumvent this problem led to, e.g., the introduction of ultimate and unchanging Gegenstnde by Wittgenstein [6], later criticized by a himself in the remarks about Excalibur and Mozes [7]. But the idea prevails, notably even in the models for Case Intensional Semantics that have recently been introduced by Nuel Belnap and Thomas Mller with the intention of (amongst others) overcoming these problems.2 u The only genuine answer, it seems to me, is to acknowledge the context dependency of identity questions and thereby the limited applicability of mathematical models in which a determinate domain has to be dened in advance. Without the idea of an ultimate model, ultimate reality escapes ultimate description and so that notion must be somehow motivated transcendentally as foundational for the possibility ofwell, of what exactly? Alternatively, metaphysics is simply the practice of describing in a suciently general way. That might be interesting in itself, but then metaphysics must be motivated pragmatically. Why do we need such general description in terms of substances, essences, and universals, over and above ordinary (but careful) description and scientic theorizing? I suggest that we simply accept the ordinary concept of reality, engage in useful description, and accept the meaningfulness of many ordinary identity statements, while rejecting the notion of ultimate reality. To preempt one stock objection to any proposal sympathetic to the later Wittgenstein: the view proposed here is not that we are somehow stuck inside language or however one should like to put it. Clearly we can identify something as the same object as that one non-verbally and such identications are often clearly (in)valid. The point is, rather, that adopting the idea of ultimate reality, and so of ultimate answers to identity issues, is to transform identication from an everyday practice into a transcendental principle. That transformation seems to me confounding, in resolving real philosophical questions, rather than helpful. There are two ways to approach the idea of real possibility. First, real could be taken as an appeal to metaphysics (as characterized above), such that we now want to determine whether certain kinds of possibilities are part of ultimate reality. Perhaps epistemic possibilities are not, but some others are. I do not understand how such a question can be answered, what the methods are for establishing either conclusion. Second, we can take real merely as contrastive with other kinds (concepts?) of possibility, such as conceivability or epistemic possibility, or physical possibility. Then, we want to explain what we mean, dierentiate these kinds of possibilities, study the modal logic of real possibility claims, and so on. There is then no need to claim that real possibility claims are even descriptions, let alone a need to claim that they are descriptions of ultimate reality.3 References [1] [2] [3] [4] J. Annas. Davidson and Anscombe on the same action. Mind, 85(338):251257, 1976. G. E. M. Anscombe. Intention. London: Basil Blackwell, 1963. J. L. Austin. Other minds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 20:148187, 1946. D. Davidson. The logical form of action sentences. In N. Rescher, editor, The Logic of Decision and Action, pages 8195. The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967. [5] P. van Inwagen. Metaphysics. Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007. [6] L. Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Translated by C.K. Ogden, with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell. [7] L. Wittgenstein. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
2 By excluding object language reference to the ultimate particulars in the domains of the cases, they in eect propose a form of quietism about the ultimate reality of objects. This refers to work of the authors in progress. 3 Semantic models can be understood as representations of real things, but in contemporary formal semantics they are also eectively encodings of logical relations between sentences in a more abstract sense, regardless of whether we should take those sentences as truly representational or not. Misunderstanding of these dierent roles of semantic models can turn harmless linguistic semantics into confusing metaphysics.