Metaphysics We Can Believe In

SNSF Starting Grant 

University of Geneva, 2024 - 2029

Much contemporary metaphysics aspires to provide us with an ‘absolute’ conception of reality – the kind of conception that, much like a god’s eye perspective, does not reflect any particular standpoint, or location, within the reality it describes. But is this a conception that any of us can rationally believe in? Many of our everyday beliefs, emotions, and actions are directed at, or motivated by, contents whose correctness depends, or appears to depend, on who we are and where, in space and time, we happen to be located. So, isn’t much of our everyday thinking better served by a conception of reality on which the latter comprises at least certain kinds of ‘perspectival’ facts? Indeed, doesn’t much of our everyday thinking requires that we believe in such facts? And if that’s so, what metaphysical conclusions should we draw from this observation?

Metaphysics We Can Believe In is a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation with a 5-year Starting Grant. The project is articulated into three work packages:

Work Package 1 - Incredible Metaphysics critically examines various ways in which philosophers have tried to square the absolute conception with the existence of agential and psychological perspectivality. These include: introducing indexical ways of thinking about absolute matters (Indexicalism), positing perspectival propositions that are not made true or false simpliciter by any facts (Relativism), but also – most controversially – enriching reality with a plethora of mutually incompatible perspectival facts (as in certain forms of Fragmentalism). 

Work Package 2 - Credible Metaphysics explores the possibility of constructing a perspectival alternative to the absolute conception. The aim, here, is to understand what image of reality is rationally required, or presupposed, by agential and psychological perspectivality. What kind of perspectival facts are we rationally committed to accept? And what notion of metaphysical reality does acceptance of these facts imply? 

Work Package 3 - Credibility in Metaphysics investigates the role of rational credibility as a criterion for theory choice in metaphysics. Assuming that certain metaphysical views are rationally unbelievable, does this imply that metaphysicians have some (perhaps only prima facie) reason to reject them? Is rational unbelievability a theoretical vice – much like the lack of elegance, simplicity, or explanatoriness? 

In investigating these and other questions, the project seeks to expose the limits of the nowadays dominant absolutist paradigm, while encouraging a rethinking of the role of metaphysics vis-à-vis both science and other areas of philosophy.

Core team:

Giovanni Merlo / Principal investigator

Malte Koot / PhD student

Elisabetta Sassarini (website) / Postdoc

Will Sharp (website) / Postdoc