Pablo Rychter

This paper defends the plausibility of antirealism about facts, and of fictionalism about ‘fact talk’. That is, it defends the view that even when a particular object o exemplifies a property P, there is no further entity to be identified with the fact that o is P; but also that it might be useful to engage in the pretense that there is such an entity. In order to defend antirealism about facts, two rival realist views are critically examined: the sort of explanatory realism that follows from Armstrong’s truthmaker argument for states of affairs, and the simple realism about facts that follows from the easy approach developed by Amie Thomasson in Ontology Made Easy and her previous work on existence questions. After offering a negative assessment of the arguments for realism, we offer some motivations for adopting a fictionalist view of fact talk, and consider how a fictionalist about facts could reply to one of Thomasson’s central objections to fictionalism, i.e. how to explain the difference between a (hypothetically successful) assertion that facts exist, and the mere pretense that facts exist.

This paper explores the nature of modal facts, such as the fact that Socrates might not have been a philosopher or that Socrates is necessarily human. First, we provide a characterization of such facts from a metaphysical standpoint, avoiding a purely linguistic approach. Second, we present a classification and discussion of various contemporary theories concerning the nature and groun-ding of modal facts. Finally, we offer a positive, though provisional, assessment of the “subjectivist” view that modal facts are grounded in facts about linguistic and conceptual practices.

A good part of the philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility in the last fifty years has revolved around so-called Frankfurt-style cases. One of the most important milestones in this debate is the case described by Mele and Robb (1998), which was intended to avoid some earlier objections directed at Frankfurt’s original argument. However, the success of Mele and Robb’s case has been contested by Pereboom (2001), Widerker (2003), and Moya (2003, 2017), among others. The present paper aims to vindicate Mele and Robb’s (and Frankfurt’s) general argument by describing a variation of their case that overcomes or avoids the objections of those authors.

Truthmaking without truthmakers (TWT, for short) is the thesis that although every true proposition is made true by reality, there need not be particular entities (like facts, states of affairs, or tropes) that make these propositions true. The first substantial part of this paper (section 2) is devoted to developing a particular version of TWT and at the same time defending TWT in general from arguments against it that have been advanced by orthodox truthmaker theorists. In the second part of the paper (section 3) I argue that talk about truthmakers within the theory can be understood as metaphoric and as conveying valuable information about something other than the supposed truthmakers: about truthmaking. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I intend to present the view on truthmaking, a version of TWT, that I find most plausible in the light of the arguments for and against truthmaker theory. On the other hand, I argue that friends of TWT have good reason to adopt a figuralist approach to truthmaker theory, rather than rejecting it outright

The ‘paradoxes of coincidence’ are generally taken as an important factor for deciding between rival views on persistence through time. In particular, the ability to deal with apparent cases of temporary coincidence is usually regarded as a good reason for favouring perdurantism (or ‘four-dimensionalism’) over endurantism (or ‘three-dimensionalism’). However, the recent work of Gilmore ( 2007 ) and McGrath ( 2007 ) challenges this standard view. For different reasons, both Gilmore and McGrath conclude that perdurantism does not really obtain support from the puzzles of temporary coincidence. In this paper, I will evaluate their arguments and defend the opposite view: that the paradoxes of coincidence do give some support to perdurantism. However, the way in which they do so is rather unexpected. As we will see, there are different ways in which coincidence scenarios may be thought to support perdurantism, some of which have not yet been sufficiently explored. Thus, my immediate goal is to explore one of those directions, bringing into focus a new argument from coincidence to perdurantism. And although I motivate my discussion by examining the arguments in the work of Gilmore and McGrath, the merits of this argument can be independently assessed. More generally, my overall purpose is to contribute to our general understanding of how the topics of coincidence and persistence bear on each other

[ES] El término «metaontología» se aplica a la indagación sobre la naturaleza de la ontología. Si bien este tipo de indagación tiene importantes precedentes en la historia de la filosofía moderna, en los últimos quince años ha cobrado renovado interés dentro de la tradición analítica, en parte debido al notorio desarrollo de la ontología misma en las últimas décadas. En este capítulo se presentarán algunos de los principales problemas metaontológicos, y las posiciones más destacadas sobre los mismos. [EN] The term «metaontology» applies to the inquiry on the nature of ontology. Although this type of inquiry has important precedents in the history of modern philosophy, in the last fifteen years it has gained renewed interest in the analytic tradition, partly because of the remarkable development of ontology itself in recent decades. This chapter will present some of the main metaontológicos problems, and the most prominent positions on them.

In the contemporary debate about the nature of persistence, stage theory is the view that ordinary objects (artefacts, animals, persons, etc.) are instantaneous and persist by being suitably related to other instantaneous objects. In this paper I focus on the issue of what stage theorists should say about the semantics of ordinary proper names, like ‘Socrates’ or ‘London’. I consider the remarks that stage theorists actually make about this issue, present some problems they face, and finally offer what I take to be the best alternative available for them.

In this introductory study I discuss the notion of alternative possibilities and its relation to contemporary debates on free will and moral responsibility. I focus on two issues: whether Frankfurt-style cases refute the principle of alternative possibilities, and whether alternative possibilities are relevant to grounding free will and moral responsibility. With respect to the first issue, I consider three objections to Frankfurt-syle cases: the flicker strategy, the dilemma defense, and the objection from new dispositionalism. With respect to the second issue, I consider the debate between Alternative Possibilities views and Actual Sequence views, as framed by Carolina Sartorio in her Causation and Free Will. I then explain how these two issues are relevant to the papers included in this volume.

Rescuing Mele/Robb Cases Resumen: Mi intención en este trabajo es exponer algunas dudas sobre las consideraciones que Carlos Moya (2017) esgrime en contra de un tipo particular de “Caso Frankfurt”: el “caso de bloqueo” descrito por Mele y Robb (1998). En primer lugar, argumento que el caso de Mele/Robb es un contraejemplo exitoso al Principio de Posibilidades Alternativas aún si, en contra de lo que sus proponentes sugieren, la acción relevante está causada de manera determinista. Por otro lado, argumento que el agente en el caso Mele/Robb ejercita un tipo relevante de control racional sobre su acción. Palabras clave: Frankfurt, Moya, sobredeterminación, sensibilidad a razones. Abstract: My goal in this paper is to expose some doubts about the arguments that Carlos Moya (2017) addresses against a particular Frankfurt-style case: the “blockage case” described by Mele and Robb (1998). I argue first that the Mele/Robb case is a succesful counterexample to the Alternative Possibilities Principle even if, against what its proponents suggest, the relevant action is deterministically caused. Second, I argue that the agent in the Mele/Robb case exercises a relevant sort of rational control over her action. Keywords: Frankfurt, Moya, overdetermination, reasons-responsiveness.

In this paper, I argue that both perdurance theory and the ‘relations-to-times’ endurantist view rely on an atemporal notion of property instantiation and relation bearing. I distinguish two possible meanings of ‘atemporal’ which result in two different understandings of what it is for an object to have a property or to bear a relation atemporally. I show that standard presentations of the theories considered are indeterminate as to which of these two understandings is the intended one. I claim that even if both understandings are admissible, one of them is more attractive and has more to recommend than the other