Scrutability and Negative Facts

• physical truths
• phenomenal truths
• indexicals

Our World:

PQI all the positive truths

T is a "that's all" or stop-clause.

Its function is to rule out further things that are not part of the world.

By adding T to the scrutability base, Chalmers ensures that the conjunction PQI exhausts what is fundamentally true of the world

Unless we add T, more than what is in PQI might be true of the world

e.g., there might be non-physical entities besides the physical ones...

T rules out

a lot-

From PQI+T, an

Ideal Reasoner (IR) can infer

all the negative truths

"One that cannot conceivably be rendered false by adding something to the world"

What about

negative facts,

in this picture?

NEGATIVE FACT

DEF [what theory of facts?]

• "There is no nonphysical ectoplasm"

• "All life is made of DNA"

[general truths = negative truths?]

“There’s no hippo in this room”

is made true by the fact that there’s no hippo in this room - that is, by the absence of the hippo.

Chalmers tells us that

all negative truths

are scrutable from

positive ones

+ T

Are the positive facts all IR can look at?

truthmaking-maximalism every truth

has a truthmaker

they don't need truthmakers!

POSITIVE

FACTS

IR should look at positive facts to check a negative truth

"there is no hippo in this room" is

made true by

the collection of all the positive facts in this room

plus

the totality-fact that that is all there is

Perhaps this picture mirrors Chalmers' semantic framework?

Totality-fact commits us to a peculiar ontology.

Ontological hierarchies ?

Multiple levels of states of affairs ?

• epistemically counterintuitive ?

Absences, lacks, omissions... They make negative truths true.

wait a second...

“If you say there is an absence in this room, then you’re affirming the existence of something in the room--

the absence.

But since ‘absence’ means that something is not,

you’re also denying that there is something in the room. Therefore, ‘There is an absence in the room’ is a contradiction.”

What do we take as

'existing'?

[common criteria for positive facts]

Being spatio-temporally located

Being

perceivable

Paris, early 1940s—

Sartre is supposed to meet his friend Pierre in some busy café.

But Sartre is late and Pierre is not there.

Having causal power/

producing effects

in the world

"Eleatic principle"

one Melissus himself would have endorsed -

& endorsed by Chalmers in the radio interview

Absences can have strong effects on people's life.

We perceive them and we respond to them,

like we do with positive entities-

that seems to happen without any conceptual sophistication

(think of a baby missing her mother or a dog missing its owner)

Omissions are as concrete as actions. We can perceive an omission. Lawmakers can give it a specific name & establish adequate punishment.

“I didn’t do anything! I only let him die”—if omissions were not really in the world, these would be good justifications.

prima facie

evidence, of course...

Great news!

David Chalmers

buys absences and negative facts!

SCRUTABILITY

and

Is there a place

for

ABSENCES

in

Chalmers'

world?

NEGATIVE FACTS

some truths are fundamental

all the truths about the world can be scrutable from fundamental truths in PQI

positive truths are fundamental

all negative truths can be scrutable from positive truths

Does this semantic hierarchy reflect a correspondent metaphysical picture?

are positive truths more fundamental than negative truths

because

[absences]

[facts including material objects, instantiated properties/relations...]

positive facts are more fundamental than negative facts?

Do positive facts ground both positive and negative truths?

Is Chalmers' world

intrinsically positive?

What

grounds negative truths,

in Chalmers' world?

Where would IR point her cosmoscope,

to check a negative truth?

Negative Facts & Truth

Absences, lacks, omissions...

They make negative truths true.

Negative truths are made true by something’s not being in the world, or by the absence of something.

consistently with Chalmers' picture

Negative truths could be falsified by adding to the world the thing that is absent, the action that has not been done, the object that would fill the emptiness.

hippo

It could be falsified by adding a to the world

(right here)

familiar issues within

the truthmaking approach

- all truths are made true by some entity or other

• Russellian facts [individual + (negative) property + (negative) relation of instantiation]
• complexes including negative properties (Baron et al. 2013)
• absences, lacks or similar localized spatiotemporal regions of the world (Martin 1996; Kukso 2008)
• atomic facts having a polarity (Beall 2000; Priest 2006)

negative facts!

of course

Absences

"what makes true a negative truth"

negative truths

totality-facts

(Armstrong 1997; 2004)

what makes them true?

the totality-fact ensures that the collection of facts is complete

& that collection is the truthmaker for negative truths

what about the conjunction of the totality-fact plus all the first-order facts?

totality-fact ?

"The truthmaker [of a negative truth] must be the fact or state of affairs that the great conjunction is all the states of affairs"

what about the conjunction of the totality-fact plus all the other facts?

totality-fact ?

"we do not need negative states of affairs in the basic ontology in addition to totality states of affairs. We can have [...] negative truths, but their truthmakers are always positive states of affairs plus some state of affairs of totality."

what about...?

(Armstrong 1997)

the regress is vicious since the collection is never complete-

same problem at every stage: a new totality-fact is needed

(Cox, 1997, Molnar 2000, Kukso 2006, Heil 2007)

e.g. truthmaker for "there's no cherries in my fridge"

is the fact that an apple and a banana being's in my fridge is all there is-

i.e., the 'great conjunction'/totality-fact of all the facts (in my fridge),

i.e., an apple's being in my fridge + a banana's being in my fridge .

totality-fact

A good strategy?

Supervenience from totality-fact on

& no increase of being?

What is the difference between totality-fact and totality-fact?

Is totality-fact a further fact or not?

vicious regress

• leading to

ontological hierarchies

POSITIVE TRUTH

Going through all the positive facts in order to check a single negative truth?

Different epistemic procedures when checking positive vs. negative truths?

Not obvious that that is actually what a subject does -

especially if the subject is IR

The totality-fact is the

conjunction of all the positive facts -

But a negative truth does not represent or reflect any of those facts - nor the conjunction thereof.

Nowhere in the complex collection we find what a negative truth describes.

(Lewis 1992)

(111)

general

(1) “all life is made of DNA”

+

negative 'strictly speaking'

• "There are more than 5 particles"

(2) “there’s no hippo in this room”

NEGATIVE TRUTH

one that can be conceivably falsified by adding something to the world

-

The Scrutability Framework

P

Any truth about a world can be scrutable from a basic set of truths about that world

Q

i

T

+

NEGATIVE FACTS DO NOT EXIST!

"there's no hippo in this room"

"All I have in my fridge is one apple"

"my car isn't there

where I parked it last night"

All count as negative truths

All can be scrutable from PQI+T

T-clause rules out everything that-is-not

It rules out everything that is absent from the world

...there might be ghosts, unicorns, and dragons. There might even be God...

T renders

"scrutable certain NEGATIVE TRUTHS about the world, such as 'There are no ghosts'"

"T says, in effect,'that's all', the world is no bigger than it needs to accommodate the truth of P,Q, and I" (111)

Since ancient time, there have been arguments against the possibility of an absence existing in the same manner as an object exists.

Melissus: “Nor is it at all empty. For what is empty is nothing, and of course what is nothing would not be”

(DK 30B7.7)

In the “fullness of being” of the café—“with its patrons, its tables, its booths, its mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere, and the sounds of voices, rattling saucers and footsteps which fill it”

—only one entity stands out against the background:

Pierre's absence

His absence “haunts” the café.

The perception of that absence occurs as vividly as any perception: “I suddenly saw that he wasn’t there.”

Sartre (1943)

(Sophist, 247e)

or

"the mark of the real"

(Molnar, 2000)

-everything that exists has some sort of effect or consequence

in the world-

www.partiallyexaminedlife.com

Killing VS. Letting Die

Missing

someone

can drive you crazy

(vacuum)

Absence of oxygen

can kill you

Not helping someone in danger

can land you

in jail

Not watering a plant can cause it to die

Why can't absences be existing negative facts?

Contradictions?

There’s no contradiction in saying that

"there’s no hippo in the room"

and

"there’s an absence (of the hippo) in the room".

These are two equivalent ways to describe the same fact

in the world --

a negative fact, precisely.

Reifying absences?

...Why not?

absences as localized states of the world

(absences of things in a specific space-time region)

(Martin 1996; Kukso 2006; Barker&Iago 2012)

Void

"a specific area or region of the universe [...] that can be characterized in terms of

its spatial and temporal location" (Kukso 2006)

The Eiffel Tower's not being next to the Sydney Opera House

"located at the discontinuous region

occupied by the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera house"

(Barker&Iago 2012)

But can we explain away absences with positive facts?

Sartre leaves the café in a bad mood. Would we say that that bad mood has been caused

by the collection of all the positive facts in the café (plus, maybe, the fact that those were all)

-- rather than, simply, by Pierre's absence?

single facts

incompatibility hides a negative fact

not real reduction of the negative to the positive

&

not real necessitation of exclusion

how does the presence of something necessitate the absence of something else?

ontological incompatibility

(Demos 1917)

a hippo being in this room is

incompatible

with all the other single things in this room

(with that chair, that window, etc.)

Each single thing exclude the hippo

totally

cool

Chalmers himself - in conversation-

said he doesn't see a problem with negative facts' being part of the world

carissa veliz

...but still it looks like in Chalmers' world -

where all the negative truths are inferred from positive truths - all we have is positive facts.

T- has ruled out everything that-is-not. Ghosts and gods, along with countless more absences.

Only positive facts, apparently, can ground and explain negative truths, in this world.

Summing Up

• does Chalmers' scrutability framework account for absences & negative facts?

• are negative truths grounded in positive facts, according to this framework?

Would T still be needed?

Losing compactness?

[it seems that absences should already be part of the base] - think of 'P'

[it seems that absences should already

be part of the base] - think of 'P'

what about truths involving, e.g., reference to vacuum?

Can we integrate absences in the base?

It seems not.

Probably not.

• it seems that we can accommodate absences & negative facts by adding truths about them to the scrutability base- would Chalmers accept this solution?

It seems yes.

Countless absences may be added to the base -

but aren't truths in P and Q equally countless?

[ facts/truthmaking framework not essential - but what account of absences? ]

Possible integration- e.g.

'NP' "There's no non-physical entity"

one application of T

ensuring physicalism

Once we have negative facts in the base, no stop-clause seems needed

"for all truths S, 'PT S' is necessary"

that is, there is no possible world outstripping our world where there are ghosts

Physicalism seems equally safe if we add absences to the base PQI:

"for all truths S, 'NPP S' is necessary"

simply ensures that there's no non-physical entity

Compactness requires few families of truth -

T ruled out ghosts, gods and hippos - but, strictly speaking, not absences thereof

e.g.

one application of T

ensuring physicalism

"for all truths S, 'PT S' is necessary"

that is, there is no possible world outstripping our world where there are ghosts

Physicalism seems equally safe if we add absences to the base PQI:

"for all truths S, 'NPP S' is necessary" simply ensures that there's no non-physical entity

couldn't absences all be part of the same family, i.e., negative facts?

A Final Dilemma

either

Chalmers explains negative facts away with positive facts,

and thereby might have to deal with issues such as regresses, ontological stratification,

explanatory insufficiency, etc.,

or

he accommodates absences and negative facts

by explicitly accepting them as part of the world

[The latter seems a natural and easy solution, also compatible with Chalmers' framework]