Ontological independence

MR1) The structure of the world is ontologically independent of the human mind. 

The correspondence theory of truth in the stipulated sense of the previous chapter is incompatible with this account on two counts. The correspondence theory in the stipulated sense is a Tarskian theory with reference understood as a non-epistemic relation to entities that are mind-independent in the sense of (MR1). The present account considers reference an epistemic relation, since it hinges on justification conditions, which are clearly epistemic. It also fits badly with the idea that the entities words refer to are ontologically independent of the human mind. The disagreement concerns both the nature of the reference relation but also one of the relata. This latter point may be less clear, since the three-step recipe does not say anything about the ontological status of the entities we refer to. So why does it naturally tie in with (IR1) rather than with (MR1) ... 

Even though this will be dealt with in more detail later, it is important to get clear about the nature of the ontological mind-dependence of the quasi-phenomenal world. It means only the mind-dependence of things, not the mind-dependence of the relations obtaining between them, which was mentioned in clause (3) of the correspondence theory in the previous paragraph. Take the sentence The table is brown . It is true if and only if the table is brown. The object the table refers to must have the property brown refers to. The object and the property are ontologically mind-dependent. But it is ontologically independent of the mind whether that object does actually have that property. 

Metaphysical realism grants the possibility of an external, inaccessible and privileged perspective. Indeed, metaphysical realism is the position which grants this possibility. According to metaphysical realism, the world is ontologically independent of the human mind, and truth is the description of the world as it is in itself. If you wish, truth is the description of the world from the world s own perspective, from a perspective which is not tied to any particular subject. In Nagel s... 

Each conceptual scheme deals with a particular segment of the world. The segments they deal with may be completely different, but they may also partly or completely coincide. In the latter case they may be said to be concerned with the same domain. Even though the idea is intuitively clear, and it is easy to give examples, it needs to be explained what it means. For metaphysical realism it is not a problem. The world has a certain structure, which is ontologically independent of... 

The second assumption that leads to the exclusion problem is the idea that any physicalist view is committed to some sort of notion of mind-body supervenience. There are many different notions of supervenience, but at minimum, a physicalist must hold that every mental property has some sort of physical base which instantiates it. The mental depends, for its existence, on some sort of underlying physical state and does not constitute its own ontologically independent domain (Kim 1998 41). Thus, if we take any mental property M, it will have some underlying set of physical properties P on which it supervenes. ... 

The third point goes back to the queshon between the epistemic and onhc views of philosophy of science. It has been menhoned a few times that the simple examples presented in this chapter are relahve to an epistemic approach, namely to a reality in terms of descriphve terms, rather than in terms of things as they really are (the ontological view). The necessary context-independence of the ontic approach precludes its applicability to concrete cases. Conversely, as Primas (1998) states,... 

Primas uses this argument to introduce the notion of contextual ontology, which refers to emergent properties arising from hidden features of the independent reality. This permits a clear view of the relation between contextual and fundamental theories, and also a generalization that is relevant for philosophy of science at large ... 

Only if we maintain multiple sets of contextual ontologies, we can tolerate the coexistence of complementary views in our experience of reality. While an independent reality itself is directly inaccessible, the numerous inequivalent contextual descriptions allow us to get deeper insight into the structure of independent reality (Primas, 1998). 

Responses to this further question appear to fall into two camps. One prominent metaphysician believes that the question needs to be approached independently of any theories of chemistry and of physics. Robin Le Poidevin has published an extensive article in which he argues in favor of the ontological reduction of chemistry to physics. He does this through what he has termed a combinatorial approach. 

This picture can indeed make clear why ontological dependence is compatible with causal independence. The idea is that ontological dependence operates on a deeper level. Let us assume that causal relations obtain between events. Take the event that it was raining in Amsterdam on January 10th, 1993 and the event of my thinking about that event. It is clear that my thinking about the event of the rain did not bring about the rain. The event of the rain is causally independent of the event of... 

It seems to me that this worry has really very little to do with physicalism. It can be raised without any references to physics. It would go like this. Take what we know about any non-mental thing. The set of facts we can list does not include the fact that it is ontologically dependent on the mind. So we have just found a counterexample to (IR1). But this sort of worry can be raised only if we forget that the facts we list are the facts we know, and knowledge presupposes mind.11 This forgetfulness can be excused only by metaphysical realists, who believe that the facts are simply out there and their character is completely independent on the mind. So this is not really a worry about the compatibility of physicalism and internal realism. Rather, it is an expression of metaphysical realist resentment to internal realism. 

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