Full title: Facts as Appearances and Appearances as Relations: Towards an Alternative to Identity and Correspondence Views of Truths and Facts, Or: Advancing McDowell and Stroud on the Tractarian Notion of the World
Abstract: I start from the beginning of the Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” John McDowell claims that this notion of the world implies idealism, but Barry Stroud disagrees. I argue that each of them lacks an essential distinction: McDowell lacks the distinction between content and object, in particular, proposition and fact, while Stroud lacks the distinction between the form and matter of a fact. I establish the first of these by reconstructing a parallel progression of views about propositions and experience. Identifying propositions and facts fails for the same reasons that Russellianism about propositions and Relationism about experience fail: they are unable to explain the false and falsidical cases. In both areas, the solution is to introduce representational contents, leading to Fregeanism about propositions and to Representationalism about experience. However, introducing contents does not explain them. These parallel explanatory gaps lead to the act-type view of propositions, on the one hand, and to capacitism about experience, on the other hand. Kant provides the most powerful development of both. His analyses share a form and have a common result: In each case, Kant analyzes the representation of combination—both as it occurs in judged facts and in perceived objects—in terms of the combination of representations. I call this Kant’s Combination Thesis. These combinations have essential features that make them possible. I argue that these essential features constitute the very form of facts which can be judged and the very form of objects which can be perceived, whatever their matter. This establishes the second distinction from above, the distinction between the form and matter of a fact. Act-types of combination in predication and sense-perception constitute representational content understood as their representational relation to a world of facts and objects of experience. I argue that this shows that facts and objects are Kantian appearances, justifying a formal idealism based on what I call Kant’s Relation Thesis: We cannot relate to the world independently of our relation to it. This leads to a third parallel progression, namely, of views about the relationship of truths and facts: from identity to realist correspondence to formal idealist correspondence.
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Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.
