Mark Balaguer. Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion: Towards a Widespread Non-Factualism

Abstract

As hardly needs to be said, the history of philosophy, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, East and West, is littered with disputes about whether entities of certain kinds exist. In the present book Mark Balaguer aims to puncture at least many such debates. He argues that for many important questions of this kind — and so for others which presuppose the existence in question — there is simply no fact of the matter. He calls this view non-factualism. After a brief Chapter 1 introducing matters, the book has two parts. The first makes the case for non-factualism in detail for two specific questions: whether there are abstract mathematical entities, and whether there are partite objects. Chapter 2 argues that there are substantial issues here, and not merely verbal ones. It might be thought that non-factualism about mathematical entities undercuts both the objectivity and the applicability of mathematics. Chapter 3 argues that this is not the case. Such things can be accommodated by an appropriate version of fictionalism. Specifically, let |$M$| be some mathematical claim. Even if there is no fact of the matter about whether |$M$| is true, the conditional, is both true and suffices for these matters. A similar point is then made about realism concerning partite objects.