FACTUALISM AND ANTI-DESCRIPTIVISM: A CHALLENGE TO THE MATERIALIST CRITERION OF FUNDAMENTALITY

• Authors: Fernández Castro Victor
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Inspired by the work of Sellars, Cumpa (2014, 2018) and Buonomo (2021) I have argued that we can evaluate our metaphysical proposals on fundamental categories in terms of their capacity for reconciling the scientific and the manifest image of the world. This criterion of fundamentality would allow us to settle the question of which categories among those proposed in the debate—e.g., substance, structure or facts—have a better explanatory value. The aim of this essay is to argue against a central assumption of the criterion: semantic descriptivism. Specifically, I aim at showing that the criterion rests on the idea that the manifest picture is mostly a description of the world, and thus, it commits us with certain realism. Instead, I argue that at least some of the vocabulary we use to construct our manifest picture of the world, mental vocabulary, is evaluative rather than descriptive and thus creates problems in reconcile the manifest picture with scientific psychology and neurosciences. I conclude with some remarks on alternatives that could provide a way out of the fundamentality criterion.

Keywords

EN

DESCRIPTIVISM; FACTUALISM; FUNDAMENTAL CATEGORIES; MENTAL VOCABULARY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 109 - 127

Contributors

author

Fernández Castro Victor

• Universidad de Granada, FiloLab-UGR, 18011 Granada, Spain

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7627-5738

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29105