David Chalmers writes big books. Constructing the World is no exception. The book is organized into eight substantial chapters and seventeen excursuses. The chapters pursue the main line of inquiry, and the excursuses respond to some objections and offer interesting developments of some of Chalmers's proposals. The book is a sustained exploration of the case for, and philosophical applications of, scrutability theses, which say that all truths can be determined, or “scried,” to use Chalmers's preferred term (30), from a relatively austere class of truths. Different scrutability theses are obtained by specifying the sorts of truths that figure in the austere basis and the form the scrying takes. The scrutability theses that play the most important role in the discussion concern scrutability of all truths from the union PQTI of
P: The class of physical truths, including macrophysical truths,1 microphysical truths, and laws;
Q: The class...
