In Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion, Mark Balaguer defenders what he calls neopositivism.
Neopositivism is the view that metaphysical questions completely decompose into ordinary empirical questions that can be answered by scientific inquiry (empirical) or ordinary logical or modal questions, which can be answered by appeal to a metaphysically innocent modalism (modal innocence) or questions that are nonfactual—that is, questions that are such that the world does not provide the question with a determinate answer (nonfactualism).
There is much to like about this book. It forcefully, and at times compellingly, presents a new vision of metaphysics. It forces us to reengage with questions about what we are doing when we do metaphysics, and presents a startling different picture to many that have emerged in recent times. Rather than conceiving of metaphysics as the search for the fundamental joints of reality, or for...
