John Bunke

Realism about metaphysics states that metaphysics seeks, and can sometimes succeed in discovering, valuable truths. One version of realism about metaphysics, which I call Structural Realism, holds that although many ordinary truths about the world seem to require the existence of certain things with particular properties, we cannot actually draw metaphysical conclusions from these truths because they are not stated in a way that “matches” or represents the intrinsic structure of reality (they do not “carve at the joints” of nature). In this paper, I clarify this view and distinguish two forms of it. I show that the more extreme version cannot be correct because a constitutive aim of language use is communication; I argue for this using a novel, teleological account of constitutive aims. I then critique the more moderate version of the theory on the grounds that it would render metaphysics irrelevant to other areas of philosophy.