Abstract
Here I examine Ernest Sosa’s metaphysical writings on four topics: realism about the external world, realism about supervenient things, realism about subjects, and realism about value. Sosa’s approach is to seek viae mediae and in particular a via media between absolutist realism and relativistic antirealism. In the case of supervenient things, this leads him to the realist theory of “existential relativity.” Here I describe Sosa’s realist views (Sect. 2) and critically discuss “existential relativity” and Sosa’s more general motivations for realism (Sect. 3)
Some questions demand begging.
—“Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit”
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Notes
- 1.
Three brief comments on Sosa’s metaphysical methods. First, his method is a priori reflection by appeal to intuitions, a method he has defended at length (for a discussion see Chap. 1). Second, Sosa’s inquiries into metaphysics are orthogonal to his inquiries in epistemology; he does not enter the metaphysical fray with an eye to some epistemological prize (cf. metaphysical direct realism, pragmatic theories of truth). (Recall that in his career Sosa was a metaphysician first and an epistemologist second.) Third, Sosa rejects the “linguistic turn” when it comes to metaphysical issues: he is critical of the strategy of “semantic ascent” as a means of approaching metaphysical questions, of attempts to articulate metaphysical theses as claims about language (1993a, p. 615), and of the metaphysical value of conceptual analysis (1999b).
- 2.
Along with the dichotomies of realism and antirealism and of relativism and absolutism, there are others in the neighborhood, including objectivity and subjectivity, contingency and necessity, particularity and universality, and the historical as opposed to the ahistorical. The meanings of these terms are frequently unclear and often contested; our aim will be to try to avoid using them without both due cause and a relatively clear sense of their meaning.
- 3.
- 4.
Even if it were, external realism might still be maintained, so long as reality was not essentially constituted by the intellectual and cultural activities and mental lives of subjects.
- 5.
Or perhaps nature literally refuses to reveal her secrets; I read that the Higgs boson was loath to be discovered and had been travelling back in time to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider.
- 6.
Following Carnap (1950), Putnam (1987, pp. 16–36) articulates the objection from “existential relativity” by appeal to a seemingly frivolous dispute between a mereological nihilist (who will countenance only three objects in a certain region, x1, x2, and x3) and a mereological universalist (who will countenance fusions as well, thus taking there to be more than three objects, including x1 + x2, x2 + x3, x1 + x3, and x1 + x2 + x3). See Sosa 1993a, pp. 614–615.
- 7.
{a} is the singleton set containing only the individual a. Individuals are distinct from their singletons: a is a member of {a}, but {a} is not a member of {a}.
- 8.
Cf. Sosa in response to Lewis’ theory of (perfectly) natural properties: “it seems not repugnant to reason that properties should form in infinite hierarchy.” (2000, p. 303) This raises “the question of whether Humean supervenience can survive rejection of ontological fundamentalism.” (2003, p. 670)
- 9.
We might take the semantic value (in context) of uses of the existential quantifier to be (partly) determined by the ontological categories of (e.g., the matter-form pairs countenanced by) the speaker’s conceptual scheme. Alternatively, we might think of context as restricting the domain of quantification (cf. Sect. 3.2). The mechanism here is to be seen as analogous to the mechanism by which the semantic value (in context) of uses of “I,” “here,” and “now” is (partly) determined by who the speaker is, where the speaker is, and at what time she is speaking. Cf. Sosa’s indexical accounts of color attribution (1990) and epistemic evaluation (1993d).
- 10.
N.b. that Hume agreed (i.e., that he endorsed the principle of metaphysical equality), as he considered persisting selves and persisting inanimate bodies to be equally fictitious.
- 11.
I treat “normative” as a broad notion and in particular as broad enough to include the “evaluative” as well as anything else that is “normative” (if there is anything else).
- 12.
When does such normative indeterminacy arise? One significant source of disagreement, Sosa suggests, is disagreement about the weight or strength of various considerations. “There can be substantial agreement over what the reasons are,” he says, “and disagreement about how their weights add up.” (Ibid.)
- 13.
See also Chap. 6.
- 14.
Cf. Sosa’s discussion of the view on which there are “quasi-absolute” moral principles that allow for “some degree of relativity,” and on which there are “a limited plurality of true moralities,” and the view that the various changes a supervenient thing can survive are limited by the “fuller form” of that thing (1987b, p. 170).
- 15.
Can Roddy say that Amanda’s claim is true iff some snow was round at t1 and disc-shaped at t2? If Amanda’s language is anything like ordinary English, this is just not credible as a truth-conditional semantics for a claim of the form “Something was destroyed between t1 and t2.” For that would mean that had the snowball not been squashed into a disc but instead melted into a puddle, then Amanda’s claim would have been false. On the other hand, if Amanda’s language is different from ordinary English, in such a way that it is credible that “something was destroyed between t1 and t2” is true iff some snow was round at t1 and disc-shaped at t2, then we don’t have anything like a case of indexical relativity. Amanda’s word “something” would just be an accidental homonym for Roddy’s word “something.” Amanda’s word “something” would mean the same as “a snowball,” and it would be false, for example, for her to say that “something exists that is not made of snow.”
- 16.
I am indebted here to Ted Sider’s discussions of these issues, and of related issues about the possibility of vague quantification (2001, pp. xix–xxiv and pp. 121–32, 2003, 2009a, b; see also van Inwagen 1990, pp. 213–27, Koslicki 2003, Smith 2005, Nolan 2006, and Liebesman and Eklund 2007). Sider has articulated a problem with the idea of “multiple quantifier meanings” that is often ignored by defenders of “quantifier variance” (Putnam 1987, Sidelle 2002, Hirsch 2002, 2005); here I’ve applied that problem to Sosa’s conceptual relativism.
- 17.
Elsewhere (1987a, p. 723–4) he is critical of Rorty’s appeal to the Sellarsian aim.
- 18.
Compare propositions to which we are committed by the way we live or by the way we ordinarily think. For example, Wittgenstein (1969) argues that the “existence of external things” is a “hinge” commitment of our thinking about the world, and Charles Taylor (1992) argues that “strong evaluation” is built into our practical thinking. The indispensible, in my sense, derives its status from its role vis-à-vis philosophical reflection in particular, not from its role vis-à-vis everyday reasoning.
- 19.
From an unpublished paper, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture”.
- 20.
- 21.
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Hazlett, A. (2013). Realism and Relativism. In: Turri, J. (eds) Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5934-3_3
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