Facts, Events, Things and the Ontology of Physics

The philosophical importance of notions like ‘facts’, ‘events’, and ‘things’ lies in the central role they play in ontology, the venerable branch of metaphysics which deals with the question of what there is. Depending on various philosophical options, reality is regarded as either constituted by things, or by events, or by facts, or by a pluralistic combination of these categories. But what, precisely, is the difference among them? And given a plausible occamist commitment to the elimination of superfluous entities, can we consider one ontological category to be more basic than the others, so as to be able to define, say, facts and things only in terms of events or, alternatively, construct facts out of things and events? To the extent that ontology is regarded as the search for the most fundamental building blocks of reality, questions like those above should not be tackled by neglecting empirical suggestions coming from physics. A mere analytically oriented discussion on the role that things, events and facts play in our ordinary language and conceptual schemes must be measured against what empirical science tells us about the ultimate constituents of the world around us. Though one can always reject inquiries of this kind by playing the instrumentalist note — according to which physics does not tell us anything above and beyond the realm of the observable — I take it that positing objects or facts as existing in a mind-independent way is philosophically not more audacious than believing in the reality of the theoretical entities postulated by a mature science. If one is embarked in the risky business of