Symposium on Writing the Book of the World

Abstract

Gabriele Contessa concludes his fine paper by saying that although he rejects my strong form of realism about structure, he accepts a weak form: Strong structure realism is what I take Sider to be advocating in Writing the Book of the World – it is the view that we do not just need to be realist about what the individual components of the world’s fundamental structure are (which might include, depending on one’s metaphysical views, universals or bare particulars or what-have-you) but also about the world’s structure itself. Weak structure realism, on the other hand, is simply the thesis that the world has one structure (as opposed to none or many), a thesis whose denial leads to various forms of metaphysical pluralism or metaphysical anti-realism. Weak structure realism takes ‘structure’ to be just a placeholder for whatever the world contains at the fundamental metaphysical level (as opposed to something one can be genuinely realist about).