Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Giorgio Volpe
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Bologna

The Individuation of Facts

In this paper I survey three major conceptions of the nature and individuation of facts and then sketch an alternative view by drawing on some ideas recently developed by Stephen Schiffer.

First, the ‘compositional’ (or ‘structural’) conception holds that facts are complex, structured entities which are individuated in terms of their constituents as related in a certain way. Advocates of this view include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, more recently, David Armstrong. A difficulty for this conception is that facts seem to be inseparably wedded to the that-clauses occurring in the expressions by which we typically refer to them. And this bond can hardly be explained on the assumption that facts are individuated in terms of constituents enjoying an identity and individuation of their own.

Second, the ‘propositional’ (or ‘linguistic’) conception holds that facts are unstructured entities which are individuated by means of the ‘canonical name’ (of the form ‘the fact that –’) by which they are typically referred to. Advocates of this view include George E. Moore and, more recently, Alan White and John Searle. Its main shortcoming is that it fails to individuate facts independently from true statements (or propositions), which apparently prevents them from playing any genuinely explanatory role in philosophical theory.

Finally, the ‘empirical’ (or ‘existentialist’) conception holds that facts are individuated in terms of distinctions which, in Kit Fine’s words, ‘make a possible difference to the world’. This conception entails that any two facts are identical if and only if they necessarily coexist. Its recent advocates include John Barwise, John Perry and Kenneth Russell Olson, while its main defect is that the claim that necessarily coexisting facts are identical to each other does not seem to be borne out by our fact-related conceptual practices.

The alternative conception I attempt to sketch in this paper turns on the claim that facts are ‘pleonastic entities’ in the sense explained by Stephen Schiffer in his book The Things We Mean. Schiffer’s contention is that properties, events, propositions and the like are ontologically minimal entities that enter our ontology as a result of our engaging in certain hypostatizing practices that are constitutive of our concepts of them. The idea is that, in order to acquire the relevant concepts, one has to learn to recognize the validity of ‘something-from-nothing transformations’ that ‘take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind [e.g., a property, an event or a proposition] to a statement in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind’. Having no hidden or substantial nature of their own, pleonastic entities are individuated wholly in terms of the linguistic practices that are constitutive of the corresponding concepts (together with such general metaphysical principles as Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals), which means that ‘if a question of individuation is left unsettled by the practices […], than that question has no determinate answer’.

To be sure, Schiffer does not include facts among the pleonastic entities to the existence of which he is committed. But this has more to do with his endorsement of the ‘Face Value Theory of Belief Reports’ than with any intrinsic feature of his theory of pleonastic entities. By dropping the Face Value Theory (which has its own serious drawbacks) one can then make out a case that facts are pleonastic entities which enter our ontology via the recognition of the validity of the something-from-nothing transformations that lead us from substitution-instances of ‘p’, through substitution-instances of ‘it is a fact that p’, to substitution-instances of ‘that p is a fact’ and ‘there is the fact that p’. The pleonastic conception of facts involves the claim that they are abstract, unstructured entities which are individuatively considerably more vague than propositions. My surmise is then that, by endorsing such a conception, one might succeed in providing a compelling account both of the feeling that facts cannot be something that is literally ‘in the world’ and of the sense that they are nevertheless relevantly different from (the ‘tautological accusatives’) of true propositions.