A fragmented world
Abstract
Objects often manifest themselves in incompatible ways across perspectives
that are on a par. Phenomena of this kind have been responsible for crucial
revisions to our conception of the world, both philosophical and scientific.
The standard response to them is to deny that the way things appear from
different perspectives are ways things really are out there, a response that
is based on an implicit metaphysical assumption that the world is a unified whole. This dissertation explores the possibility that this assumption is
false, that the world is fragmented instead of unified. On the proposed understanding
of such worldly fragmentation, there is a notion of co-obtainment
according to which two facts may obtain without co-obtaining. Since not every
fact that obtains also co-obtains with every other fact, two incompatible
facts may both obtain, as long as they do not co-obtain in the introduced
sense. The possibility of such fragmentation sheds new light on a range of
phenomena. It allows us to explore a view of time that takes the notion of
passage as its defining primitive. It bolsters a no-subject view of experience
against the objection that it leads to solipsism. It allows a realist view about
colours to withstand the objection from conflicting appearances. And, it
makes room for a view on which things really have the properties that are
attributed to objects and events across different frames of reference, such as
length, mass, duration and simultaneity. Overall, fragmentalism changes the
way in which the manifest image feeds into an objective conception of the
world: what is manifest to us is not misleading in what sort of properties it
shows the world to have, it's only misleading in making it seem more unified
than it really is.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.