Factualism and Anti-Descriptivism: A Challenge to the Materialist Criterion of Fundamentality
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemAutor
Fernández Castro, VíctorEditorial
Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied Veda
Materia
Descriptivism Factualism Fundamental categories Mental vocabulary
Fecha
2022-02Referencia bibliográfica
Fernández Castro, V. (2022). Factualism and Anti-Descriptivism: A Challenge to the Materialist Criterion of Fundamentality. Organon F, 29(1), 109-127. 1335-0668. DOI: [https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29105]
Patrocinador
Spanish Government PID2019-108870GB-I00 PID2019-109764RB-100Resumen
Inspired by the work of Sellars, Cumpa (2014, 2018) and Buonomo (2021) 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., sub-stance, 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 crite-rion 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.