Manish Oza

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.

Thinking about oneself as a subject leaves unanswered fundamental questions about one’s identity as an object: about which thing one is, about what kind of thing one is, and about whether one exists at all. I put forward a new way of thinking about these questions by outlining the subject-as-object problem, a problem for inquiry directed at oneself qua subject. I argue that the source of the problem lies in the relationship between a basic precondition for inquiry – that something be present – and a framework that enables us to conceive of ourselves as inquirers in an objective world – the framework of objectivity. Once the problem is recognized, we can explain why there is always room for questions about one’s identity in response to any account of oneself and one’s relation to the world.

The idea that logic is in some sense normative for thought and reasoning is a familiar one. Some of the most prominent figures in the history of philosophy including Kant and Frege have been among its defenders. The most natural way of spelling out this idea is to formulate wide-scope deductive requirements on belief which rule out certain states as irrational. But what can account for the truth of such deductive requirements of rationality? By far, the most prominent responses draw in one way or another on the idea that belief aims at the truth. In this paper, I consider two ways of making this line of thought more precise and I argue that they both fail. In particular, I examine a recent attempt by Epistemic Utility Theory to give a veritist account of deductive coherence requirements. I argue that despite its proponents’ best efforts, Epistemic Utility Theory cannot vindicate such requirements.