Natural facts show up in descriptions only through concepts and linguistic forms, so any “manifestation” of fact in language is already a conceptual and normative achievement, not a passive mirroring of a bare given. Put differently: there is no route from mute nature to description that bypasses the space of reasons (concepts, inference, and truth-assessable claims).​

Facts, states of affairs, and propositions

Many metaphysicians distinguish between: (a) facts or states of affairs (how the world is), and (b) propositions (the contents of descriptions that can be true or false). On one influential picture, a true proposition “matches” or is made true by a corresponding fact, but the fact itself is not linguistic, only something that language can correctly represent.​

Against a “brute Given”

Sellars argues that there are no non-conceptual, self-justifying “givens” that could simply impress facts on the mind and thereby generate descriptive knowledge. For a fact to figure in knowledge, it must already be taken up in a linguistically articulated claim of the form “S knows that p,” which presupposes a conceptually structured practice of justification.​

World as “true thinkables”

McDowell develops this by saying that the world can be seen as “the totality of true thinkables,” where facts are not alien impacts on thought but are themselves available to conceptual capacities. On this view, when a description is true, the very same content that is thinkable (the proposition) is also what constitutes the fact, so the “manifestation” relation is one of content-identity under different roles (as thought vs as reality).​

Natural language and metaphysical structure

Some contemporary work argues that ordinary natural language is already well-suited to represent all the facts metaphysics is concerned with, ruling out ineffable facts “beyond” any possible description. That claim is often paired with a “natural language metaphysics,” where the categorial structure built into grammar and lexical distinctions (objects/events, mass/count, etc.) encodes a commonsense ontology through which facts become describable at all.​

Putting it together

Metaphysically, the manifestation of natural facts in description is mediated by:

• An ontology of facts or states of affairs that can stand in truth-making relations to propositions.​

• A rejection of bare, non-conceptual facts as epistemically basic, insisting instead that facts enter cognition within a conceptual, linguistic space of reasons.​

• A conceptual scheme (often realized in natural language) whose categories and inferential roles structure how facts can be articulated, thus making “what is the case” and “what is sayable as true” internally related rather than externally glued together.

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• ​Invariance strongly suggests that there is more than any one description, but it does not by itself decide whether that “more” is a mind‑independent structure or a structure fixed by our best practices of representation. It tells you that something about how we successfully represent the world is robust across changes of coordinates, theory, or vocabulary, but leaves open whether that robustness is in the world, in the scheme, or in their fit.​

  Invariance and objectivity

  Nozick’s idea is that the mark of the objectively real is precisely invariance under a wide class of transformations: what survives such transformations counts as objectively there. On this view, the invariants picked out by our descriptions (like space‑time intervals under Lorentz transformations or temperature relations across scales) are not mere conventions but latch onto real structure.​

  Structural realism option

  Structural realists argue that what remains stable across radical theory change is the mathematical or relational structure, and that this is what our best science is latching onto. So the “more than descriptions” is not a set of intrinsic objects with hidden natures, but a network of relations that different descriptions approximate from different angles.​

  Internal realism option

  Internal realists (like later Putnam) concede the force of invariance but locate it inside a conceptual scheme: invariants are those structures that any admissible model within that scheme must preserve. On this view, there is no standpoint outside all schemes from which to say “this is the world’s structure itself,” yet talk of invariance still underwrites a non‑arbitrary sense of objectivity.​

  How your thought fits

  Your intuition that invariance is “not a name or a convention” tracks a realist pull: the invariants are what push back against arbitrary redescriptions. The philosophically live question is whether to read that pushback as (a) evidence for a mind‑independent structured reality, (b) evidence that some forms of description are forced by our practices and cognitive makeup, or (c) both, via a picture where worldly structure and representational norms are tightly coupled.

• Perplexity​