Facts for Necessitists and Permanentists

Both Williamson and Severino are committed to the thesis that whatever exists permanently and necessarily exists. They, therefore, need an account of the reality of becoming and contingency. This paper compares their approaches, with a focus on the role played in them by facts. According to Williamson, it is contingent how necessary entities are. Consequently, his metaphysics is incompatible with the existence of truth-making entities, such as facts. In contrast, Severino also admits permanent and necessary truth-making facts, which are about specific times. Severino explains the reality of becoming differently: things – including facts – do not begin or cease to exist but appear and disappear. Some reality is also attributed to contingency, inasmuch as some features of appearance (the background) are necessary in an especially strong way, while others (the variants) are necessary only in a more general way. To further situate Severino’s account with respect to analytic metaphysics, two other versions of permanentism and necessitism are also involved in the comparison, namely the early Wittgenstein’s theory of objects and facts and Karofsky’s so-called necessitarianism.