The Relation between General and Particular: Entailment vs. Supervenience

I say (with many others): the world is a thing, the biggest thing, the mereological sum (or aggregate) of all things. Truth is determined by the distribution of fundamental, or perfectly natural, properties and relations over the parts of this biggest thing. For want of a better name, call this the thing theory.1 Some say instead: the world is a fact, the most inclusive fact, the conjunction (also mereological sum) of all the facts. Truth is determined by (some sort of) correspondence to the facts. Call this, following Armstrong, factualism.2 The dispute between the thing theory and factualism can be traced, of course, to the opening lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, where it received second billing: 1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. Could there be a starker division between fundamental ontological theories of the world? On closer inspection, however, the division appears less stark. A factualist need not reject things; nor need a thing theorist reject (all) facts. For each thing accepted by the thing theorist, there is an associated fact accepted by the factualist saying that the thing has the nature that it does. A factualist can identify things with their associated facts at no ontological cost: (some) facts are also things.4 In the other direction, a thing theorist can identify the fact associated with a thing with the thing itself: things are also facts. Some metaphysicians may protest: the thing and its associated fact differ in their modal existence conditions, and so cannot be identified; a red ball, for example, can exist without being red, whereas whenever the associated fact exists, the ball exists and is red. But an enlightened factualist or thing theorist, one who appreciates the inconstancy of de re modality, need no more reject the identity of things