3 - Properties I

Summary

PRELIMINARY

We now take up the main line of the argument. The world is a world of states of affairs. The phrase ‘state of affairs’ will be used in the same way that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus used the term ‘fact’. Indeed, his famous proposition 1.1: ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’ may serve as charter of the present enterprise. Wittgenstein's terminology has been followed by Brian Skyrms in his brief but penetrating paper ‘Tractarian nominalism’ (1981, reprinted in Armstrong 1989b). For Wittgenstein, states of affairs are no more than possible facts. It seems, however, that the word ‘fact’ is too much a term of ordinary speech. In particular, contemporary use ties it too closely to the notions of statement and proposition. It is natural for philosophers to think of facts as the ‘tautological accusatives’ of true statements and true propositions. Facts in this sense are what true statements state and true propositions propose. More simply, they are truths.

Given this, and given a semantic condition of identity for statements, propositions and truths, then to each different true statement, proposition and truth there corresponds its own peculiar fact. This is quite unsatisfactory for present purposes. The phrase ‘state of affairs’ seems better. In addition, it sounds less colloquial and more like a term of art, which is what is required.

We require at this point a distinction between atomic and molecular states of affairs.