Introduction: Regularities and the Objective Background of Communication

Abstract

Very often, philosophical interest in the ontologies of causation and natural kinds is motivated by the importance of these issues for science. There is, however, another and equally fundamental reason for undertaking such an inquiry. Communication and meaning, both necessary conditions for science as we have it, are themselves possible in virtue of observable regularities. And the best explanation of the existence of observable regularities is that they are the manifestations of objective relationships which are aspects of the physical world. Unless some form of subjective idealism is adopted, there are compelling reasons for acknowledging that communication and meaning necessitate the existence of real essential and causal relations. Moreover, neither communication nor meaning would exist if the passage of time were merely a phenomenon, that is, an experience that owes its existence to our subjective conditions. Temporal flow must be real if what we conceive as conveying messages from one individual to another is to be regarded as a worldly fact. Hence an account of just how essences, causal relations and “temporal becoming” are objective is requisite as an adequate logical basis for our common belief that communication, and the meaningful utterances put to use in it, are not altogether an illusion.