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Strawson's descriptive metaphysics was the first explicit and elaborate rehabilitation of metaphysics within the analytic tradition. This chapter discusses Strawson's contributions to metaphysics with a particular view to his conception of the nature of metaphysics-cum-ontology. This chapter first dwells on the background of Strawson's metaphysics. Next it introduces Strawson's idea of descriptive metaphysics and of connective analysis. Sections 3–8 discuss Strawson's main claims: self-conscious experience presupposes a distinction between experience and its mind-independent objects, objective particulars must be situated in a spatio-temporal framework, material bodies are ontologically prior because they sustain this framework, experience and discourse revolve around a fundamental distinction between reference and predication, both particulars and universals are among our objects of reference. This chapter tries to reconstruct the main lines of argument by combining ideas from Individuals and Bounds of Sense. Sections 9–11 defend Strawson's modest conception of metaphysics as a second-order description of our conceptual scheme.

The logical positivists’ critical attitude towards metaphysics is sketched. Strawson’s conception of descriptive and revisionary metaphysics is described. Revisionary metaphysics is argued to be chimerical, and descriptive metaphysics is argued not to be a form of metaphysics at all. Strawson’s failure to account for the status of propositions of descriptive metaphysics is held to be remediable by reference to Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical propositions that express norms of representation.

Strawson’s famous distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics describes two different methodological approaches to the question of fundamental ontology. This chapter focuses mainly on the origin of the descriptive enterprise in Aristotle’s metaphysics and examines Whitehead and Quine’s criticisms of this approach to the formulation of a viable conceptual scheme for modern physics. The project of descriptive metaphysics and the concept of substance are rejected on both scientific and philosophical grounds.

Natural language, it appears, reflects in part our conception of the world. Natural language displays a great range of types of referential noun phrases that seem to stand for objects of various ontological categories and types, and it also involves constructions, categories, and expressions that appear to convey ontological or notions. Natural language reflects its own ontology, an ontology that may differ from the ontology a philosopher may be willing to accept or even a nonphilosopher when thinking about what there is, and of course it may differ from the ontology of what there really is. This chapter gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, discusses what sorts of data may be considered reflective of the ontology of natural language, and addresses Chomsky’s dismissal of externalist semantics.

The Conclusion sums up Against Facts’ main findings: in part I and II Armstrong’s truthmaker argument and the argument from nominal reference have been shown to be unsound. The two kinds of methodology used in the two parts of the book are highlighted, and certain enterprises in language-based descriptive metaphysics are criticised, namely enterprises that pretends to discover something about metaphysical entities by citing natural language analyses. It is argued that at least in case of technical philosophical terms like ‘fact’, ‘proposition’, ‘event’, and the like, reference collapses into fixing by stipulation a semantic value for those terms. The methodological proposal is made that we are entitled to take certain (categories of) entities as semantic value of certain expressions only if these entities are best-explanation players for the theoretical roles we deemed must indispensably be played, where indispensability is decided by criteria of theory choice agreed upon by the largest scientific community. It is concluded that defenders of facts have so far failed to show that facts should be given any place in metaphysics.

This chapter discusses the influence of pragmatism in Oxford in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins by identifying five characteristic components of pragmatism: (1) a doxastic theory of truth; (2) a broadly empiricist account of meaning; (3) a fallibilist, dynamic, inquiry-centred account of knowledge; (4) a hostility to dualism; and (5) an affirmation of the primacy of practice. It then shows that each of these ideas finds expression in the writings of one of the great figures of Oxford philosophy—P. F. Strawson. Nevertheless, it argues that there are aspects of Strawson’s conception of philosophy—particularly his commitment to descriptive metaphysics—that are alien to the spirit of pragmatism in a way that reflects something deep about the style of Oxford philosophy of the period.