Philosopher Amie Thomasson is a leading figure in “deflationary” and neo-pragmatist approaches to metaphysics and ontology, along with other philosophers like Huw Price, Jenann Ismael, Matthieu Queloz, Jose Zalabardo, Cheryl Misak, and Michael Williams. (This is a useful and illustrative collection.) Timothy Williamson, by contrast, is a stalwart friend of “inflationary” metaphysics. Unsurprisingly, he did not like Professor Thomasson’s recent book. Professor Thomasson, also unsurprisingly, did not like his review. She kindly gave me permission to share a revised version of comments she posted on Facebook:

NDPR could not have chosen a less charitable reviewer for Rethinking Metaphysics than Tim Williamson. I am sure he found it a convenient and prominent place to promote his views and insult mine without bothering to engage with them. But anyone who wants to know what’s actually in the book would do better to look elsewhere.

He spends more time discussing what I do not mention than engaging with what I actually do in the book. And the alleged ‘omissions’ are often things I discuss extensively elsewhere. For those interested: I discuss the common objection that the deflationary view is self-defeating because it is ‘just more metaphysics’ in Chapters 10 and 11 of Ontology Made Easy (OUP 2015).  I discuss problems with inconsistencies in property comprehension principles, and other ‘bad company’ problems, extensively in Chapter 8 of Ontology Made Easy. I discuss different forms of modal discourse and the approaches to modal epistemology by Sonia Roca-Royes, Barbara Vetter, and Williamson himself in Chapter 7 of Norms and Necessity (OUP 2020). I discuss the relation between my modal views and compositional (Kratzer-style) modal semantics in my response to Rohan Sud in the symposium on Norms and Necessity in Inquiry (2024).

Those were topics for my prior work. The central topic in Rethinking Metaphysics was to make use of work in empirical linguistics to develop an approach to understanding linguistic functions, and to show its relevance to understanding past work in metaphysics and to engaging in work in conceptual engineering. As I discuss, this sense of function is very different from the different uses Williamson says are ‘uncontroversial’. And as I discuss, this does not prevent us from allowing that declarative sentences express propositions—so his alleged contrast with ‘non-easy metaphysicians’ is incorrect.

I show how this provides a uniform diagnosis of the problems behind various metaphysical approaches (Part 1). (It is striking how Williamson applauds unifying explanations as confirming theories, and a few paragraphs later mocks my unified diagnosis of various problems in metaphysics as ‘like a doctor who diagnoses all patients with the same disease’.) In Part 2 I show how it provides a helpful way forward in better understanding and disentangling ourselves from many old philosophical problems, and how it enables us to rethink the work of metaphysics as conceptual engineering.

Also, for the record, the work in linguistics I draw on is Systemic Functional Linguistics—SFL, not ‘FSL’ as Williamson often renders it, in a slip that is symptomatic of his level of care and engagement.

I hope that others will at least respectfully engage with what I say in the book, and come to have a real conversation about some of the ideas there, rather than simply insulting and dismissing it. Insults come out when arguments run out.

(To be fair to insults: they can also come after the arguments have done their work.)