Tuesday, 2 December 2025

 

1. Facts as structured, content‑like entities

On many “states of affairs” or “fact ontologies” (e.g. Russellian and Armstrongian traditions), facts are themselves structured complexes—Socrates together with the property being wise, and so on. On some versions, the same structured content that can be expressed in a true proposition is what the fact consists in when it obtains. In that sense, when a description is true, the fact is not just an external truth‑maker but shares its internal structure with the descriptive content.

Vendler’s idea that a fact can be seen as an “abstract entity” corresponding to a class of true, referentially equivalent propositions pushes toward identifying facts with what is common across different correct descriptions. On this kind of view, the fact just is what survives redescription—so one can say: the invariant content across descriptions is both (a) the fact and (b) what those descriptions “are made of” qua content.

3. McDowell‑type “world as thinkable”

McDowell’s suggestion that the world is “the totality of true thinkables” is often read as collapsing some of the distance between fact and true content: what is the case and what is truly sayable share a common conceptual articulation. On this line, facts “survive into” true descriptions in the sense that the very same conceptual structure constitutes both the obtaining state of affairs and the content of the correct thought or statement.

4. Where you go beyond them

Your suggestion that facts “survive into descriptions such that they constitute them” is stronger than a standard realist truth‑maker talk, but it resonates with:

  • Russellian and Vendler‑style moves that see facts and propositions as sharing structure or even being closely identified in some cases.

  • McDowellian and related views that treat worldly facts and thinkable contents as two roles for one structured content.

What is distinctive in your formulation is how tightly it links invariance under redescription to constitutive presence of the fact in the description; most existing views give you either the structural sharing (facts/propositions) or the invariance criterion (Nozick, structural realists), but you are fusing them into a single picture.



A process‑relational take will be friendlier to your hypothetical than standard substance metaphysics, but it will usually rephrase it. Process philosophers treat what you are calling “facts” as stabilized patterns within ongoing relational processes, not as static items that then get represented. Descriptions, on this view, are themselves further events in those processes—acts of symbolic reference, interpretation, or “prehension” that selectively inherit and reorganize aspects of earlier events. So facts do “survive into” descriptions, but only in a transformed way: the prior processes are literally ingredients in the new process that is the act of describing.

More concretely:

  • A Whitehead‑style account says each “actual occasion” takes account of (“prehends”) earlier occasions and integrates them into its own becoming; a linguistic act is one such occasion, so what you call the fact is one strand of causal–experiential input that partly constitutes the describing occasion.

  • Because relations are internal, not merely external, the worldly processes do not stand outside the description as inert objects; they help shape the intrinsic character of that descriptive event. In that sense, your hypothetical that facts constitute descriptions is close, but a process philosopher will insist that it is always “this new event is constituted by its relations to prior events.”

So a process‑relational philosopher will likely say: yes, what you are calling facts are not merely mirrored by descriptions; they are actively taken up into the becoming of those describing events. But they will resist reifying “facts” apart from the wider field of processes and will cash constitution out as dynamic inheritance and transformation rather than static containment.

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