Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy Again

Okay, so I never got round to posting anything about Dyke’s book (see the previous post). As ever, various other commitments got in the way. But I have written my review, and I thought I’d blog about some of the issues I raise in the review.

The problem with contemporary metaphysics, Dyke thinks, is that its practitioners are prone to commit the “representational fallacy”. One commits this fallacy when one moves from premises about the structure of our representations of reality to conclusions about the structure of the non-representational world itself. We are prone to commit this fallacy due to a tendency to place too much emphasis on language when doing ontology.

Our tendency to commit the representational fallacy is, Dyke suggests, a consequence of the assumption that there is a direct link between language and ontology, an assumption which Dyke (p. 7) formulates as follows:

There is a privileged true description of reality, the sentences of which (a) stand in a one-one correspondence with facts in the world, and (b) are structurally isomorphic to the facts with which they correspond.

This is Dyke’s Strong Linguistic Thesis (SLT). As Dyke presents them, proponents of SLT “are committed to there being a privileged true description of reality; that description contains only a subset of all the truths that there are, and that subset of truths is ontologically perspicuous” (p. 71).

Dyke approach to ontology is based upon the rejection of SLT. Her proposal, in essence, is based upon a rejection of the Quinean dictum that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” (chapter 3). For Dyke, the question with which ontologists should be concerned is not that of whether the Fs are among the values of bound variables but that of whether the Fs are among the truth-makers for true sentences involving quantification over Fs. Truthmaking is here not to be understood as an intensional relation — it is not to be analyzed in terms of modal notions such as counterfactual dependence or supervenience. Rather, truthmaking is here to be understood as a hyperintensional relationship, so that the existence of the Fs may make it true that the Gs exist (and not the other way round), even if it is necessary that the Fs exist iff the Gs exist. It is the truthmaker question which should have pride of place in metaphysics, and we will lose the tendency to commit the representational fallacy once it is given centre stage. Having developed her view, Dyke’s spends the latter parts of her book examining the ramifications that her approach has for (inter alia) the debates over moral naturalism, vagueness, material constitution, the existence of mathematical objects, causation, and the nature of modality.

There is much in Dyke’s approach to metaphysics with which I am sympathetic. The question of what it is in virtue of which true sentences are true should, I think, be a proper focus of metaphysical inquiry. But despite my general sympathies with her approach, I think that Dyke’s handling of the issues problematic in a number of respects.

For one thing, I think that Dyke is wrong to suggest that her truthmaker-first approach to ontology requires us to reject SLT: Dyke can accept that there is a privileged description of reality, some set which contains a subset of all the truths that there are and which is ontologically perspicuous. For instance, even if one accepts that tensed sentences are non-paraphrasable but made true by tenseless facts, it is perfectly consistent to also hold that the privileged true description of reality contains only tenseless sentences. Each tenseless fact, each truthmaker for the tensed truths, will correspond to a particular tenseless sentence and there will therefore be a set $ of these sentences. The sentences that are members of $ might not mean the same as tensed sentences, but they will be tenseless representations of the tenseless facts in virtue of which tensed sentences are true. And so there is no conflict with SLT — the members of $ are a subset of the truths which stand in a one-to-one correspondence with the tenseless facts which make the tensed sentences true, and in this way the members of $ provide an ontologically perspicuous representation of tenseless reality. To put the point otherwise, Dyke needn’t be a thorough-going anti-Quinean about ontological commitment. If we have a language L whose quantifiers ranged over all and only the fundamental entities — the basic entities which make everything else true — then there is no reason why Dyke should deny that to be is to be in the range of L’s variables.

A second problem relates to way in which Dyke proposes to understand the relationship between truthmaking and ontological commitment. For if we agree with Dyke that the ontological question is the question of what makes things true, a natural question arises regarding ontological commitment. If the existence of lumps of clay makes it true that there are statues, as Dyke (chapter 7) suggests, we want to know whether this is an account on which we are ontologically committed to both states and lumps of clay, or whether this is an account on which we are only ontologically committed to lumps of clay. So does Dyke think that the ontological commitments of a theory are its truthmaking commitments, or does she think that the ontological commitments of a theory are to both its truthmaking entities and its truthmade entities? As far as I understand the following passage, Dyke endorse the latter construal in the case of statues:

It is possible to be a realist about statues, that is, to think that statues exist as a part of extralinguistic reality, and that their existence is independent of our ability to describe them, but they do not exist “over an above,” or as entities in addition to, the lumps of clay out of which they are constituted (p.147)

But at other times Dyke seems to suggest that the ontological commitments of a theory are only its truthmaking commitments. For instance, in applying her view to the case of mathematical objects, Dyke characterizes her view as one which “claims that mathematical statements can be true and yet not be committed to the existence of mathematical entities” (p.163) because the question of whether mathematical objects exist “is not to be answered by examining mathematical sentences” but by examining their truthmakers (p.165). But if the question of whether mathematical objects exists is to be answered by looking for the truthmakers for mathematical statements, then the question of whether statues exist is to be answered by looking for the truthmakers for statue statements. In the latter case, Dyke concedes that statues exist even though statue claims are made true by lumps of clay, whereby it becomes unclear whether Dyke is defending a form of realism, or a form of anti-realism.