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Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2015, pp. 296
Lando, Giorgio
2016
Abstract
In 'Against Facts' Betti aims to show that none of the arguments brought forward by philosophers and linguists in favour of the existence of facts is convincing. Betti distinguishes compositional facts, whose exclusive explanatory role would be to make true relational sentences, and propositional facts, which would be the objects of factive propositional attitudes, such as knowledge. According to Betti, compositional facts are ad hoc entities. However, the charge of adhocness seems to depend in part on the fact that Betti focuses from the start on a single explanatory role for compositional facts. For what concerns propositional facts, Betti contends that there is no good reason to think that they are the referents of 'that'-clauses. However, Betti does not discuss other roles which facts could play in the analysis of propositional attitudes. Betti fails to show convincingly that there are no facts. Nonetheless, anybody interested in facts will benefit greatly from reading this book. Moreover, Betti's book has the important merit of discussing an underexplored metaphysical alternative to facts: relata-specific relations.
Journal
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Source
Giorgio Lando, "Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2015, pp. 296", in "APhEx 14", 2016, pp. 14
Languages
it
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