Can There Be Brute,Contingent Moral Facts

In this paper I argue that whether or not a world is good can be a contingent fact about the world that is not dependent upon that world's natural facts, or, indeed, upon anyother facts. If so, the property, good, does not supervene upon the facts of nature (or upon any other facts). My argument for this claimis that it is possible to view the very world in which we live (viz. the natural facts that constitute it) as good and to view it as bad.     

Do Brute Facts Need to Be Civilised? Universals in Classical Indian Philosophy and Contemporary Analytic Ontology

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - A vital point of dispute within both classical Indian thought and contemporary analytic ontology is the following: which facts are brute so...     

Facts and Truth-making

This essay is a reflection on the idea of truth-making and its applications. I respond to a critique of my 1986 paper on truth-making and discuss some key principles at play in the Truth-maker Program as it has emerged over the past 25 years, paying special attention to negative and general truths. I maintain my opposition to negative and general facts, but give an improved account of how to do without them. In the end, I accept Truth-maker Maximalism and a weakened form of Truth-maker Necessitarianism, reject the assumption that truth-makers must be entities, and urge that the idea of a truth-maker be broadened and loosened so that it applies to anti-realistic as well as realistic truths.     

Grounding Thick Normative Facts

Many philosophers have been concerned with the nature of thick normative concepts. In this paper, I try to motivate a different project: understanding the nature of thick normative properties and facts. I propose a ground‐theoretic approach to this project. I then argue that some of the simplest and most initially plausible ways of understanding thick facts fail and that we are forced to accept some initially implausible views. I try to show how these views are not so implausible after all.     

Setting the Facts Straight

Substantial facts (or states of affairs) are not well-understood entities. Many philosophers object to their existence on this basis. Yet facts, if they can be understood, promise to do a lot of philosophical work: they can be used to construct theories of property possession and truthmaking, for example. Here, I give a formal theory of facts, including negative and logically complex facts. I provide a theory of reduction similar to that of the typed λ-calculus and use it to provide identity conditions for facts. This theory validates truthmaker maximalism: it provides truthmakers for all truths. I then show how the usual truth-in-a-model relation can be replaced by two relations: one between models and facts, saying that a given fact obtains relative to the model, and the other between facts and propositions: the truthmaking relation.     

使真者与否定事实

是否存在否定事实这个问题自1914年罗素首先提出后就一直受到哲学家们的关注与讨论,在当代,因其与真理论(特别是使真者理论)以及形而上学的关联而更受到哲学家们的重视。在使真者理论的语境下,否定事实被看作是为了解释否定真理而必须承诺的。哲学家们已经探寻了几种拒斥否定事实的策略,最主要的有不相容解决和不相同解决,但这些策略似乎都面临着通常刻画下的使真者必然主义的难题。绝大部分关注此问题的哲学家因此认为存在否定事实,但本文试图表明问题出在对使真者必然主义的通常刻画上。当拒斥上述通常刻画后,否定事实其存在的必要性不复存在。