ABSTRACT
Is Nietzschean constructivism alive and well in contemporary debates about material object metaphysics? The answer is easy: no. A few contemporary metaphysicians suggest that objects, in some non-trivial sense, are socially constructed. 1 But the position is a drastic minority. It has been largely stamped out. It just seems obviously true that objects such as trees and birds are in no way brought into existence by our social practices. Most often, the truth of objectivism does not even require argument. 2 Nearly all metaphysicians in the analytic tradition embrace such a position— too many, in fact, to name here. Consider, for example, the first paragraph of Sider’s influential book, Writing the Book of the World:
The world has a distinguished structure, a privileged description. For a representation to be fully successful, truth is not enough; the representation must also use the right concepts, so that its conceptual structure matches reality’s structure. There is an objectively correct way to “write the book of the world.”
(Sider 2011, v) The point to notice is that naturally occurring objects have boundary conditions, or structure, independent of our representational practices. The metaphysician’s job is to describe this structure:Discerning “structure” means discerning patterns. It means figuring out the right categories for describing the world. It means “carving reality at its joints,” to paraphrase Plato. It means inquiring into how the world fundamentally is, as opposed to how we ordinarily speak or think of it.
(Sider 2011, 1) The predominant view in metaphysics holds that (i) reality has some inherent structure, (ii) there is a clear divide between the structure of reality and our ways of describing the structure of reality, and (iii) our descriptions should aim to represent the structure of reality as it exists apart from our ways of describing it. This amounts to a staunch rejection of constructivism in the analytic world. 3