FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO METAPHYSICS

In the previous chapter, I was pursuing epistemological issues, in particular, an integrationist model for the justification of moral beliefs. One of my major claims was that justification should be understood in terms of reliable mechanisms that enable the acquisition of approximately true moral beliefs. We can take it for granted that if we hang around with epistemology for very long, her companion metaphysics will show up. In fact, issues of truth are ones that often bring metaphysics around. So it will behoove us, for a number of reasons, to turn now to the metaphysical issues that have been lurking around our epistemological discussions.

Although none of the classical views on truth we have examined thus far are necessarily antithetical to a realist view, the correspondence view is the one that seems to fit best with a realist position, that is, roughly, the view that true beliefs correspond with a reality that is independent of the ways that we might conceive of it in our thinking or theorizing and independent of the ways in which we might desire or wish it to be. Although one might rightly suppose that integrationists have a certain affinity for both scientific realism and moral realism, it is easy to see that that combination is not the only one available to an integrationist.