Imagining god creating poppies
I think the standard self-conception of metaphysicians today is that they don’t need to decide between correspondence theory and deflationism unless they’re specifically interested in the metaphysics of truth. The bulk of metaphysics is about the world itself, not our representations of it. Now, I think this attitude is completely appropriate at the beginning of inquiry. If we’re interested in whether or not God exists, for example, there’s no reason to expect at the outset that the answer will turn on the semantics of proper names or the nature of truth. But we also need to be open to the possibility that, as metaphysical inquiry proceeds, issues in the philosophy of language might become increasingly relevant in unexpected ways.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alexis Burgess.