Thursday, September 29, 2011

Objective reality revisited

The proprietor of Maverick Philosopher, who we will call 'Bill', has just posted about my comments on objective reality. Definitely worth reading, but makes me realise my comments (that there is such a thing as 'objective reality') were not entirely consistent with what I have been strenuously maintaining both here and over there,  namely that there is no such thing as objective reality after all.  For example, way back here, or here.

I have argued that there are no truthmakers, otherwise the truth of 'it will be sunny tomorrow' would depend on the existence of a present truthmaker.  But if that truthmaker does exist, then a few seconds later it did exist. But we can't change the past, so we can't change the truthmaker, and since the truthmaker makes the future true, it follows that we can't change the future.  But we can change the future: it is not determinate.  Therefore there are no truthmakers.  Therefore there is no 'objective reality'.

Fortunately Bill failed to spot this irregularity.

1 comment:

David Brightly said...

Good to see you're a Platonist only on Sunday. ;-)