Review of Barry Stroud, 'Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value', Oxford University Press, 2011, 163pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780199764969.

Abstract

Barry Stroud argues that puzzles about the metaphysical status of values, modality and causation are of a particularly recalcitrant kind: on the one hand, we cannot make sense of the world without believing these properties exist and thus can know that attempts to unmask them as illusory or as mental constructions must fail. On the other hand, we have no satisfying positive reason to believe in their mind-independent reality. He writes: "A positive metaphysical verdict could at least seem to offer what a negative verdict promised but could not deliver: a detached, impartial and consistently acceptable account of the relation between the beliefs in question and the independent reality they are about." (p. 158). The failure of negative evaluations does not by itself support any such positive verdict. Indeed, "if modal and evaluative notions are felt to be metaphysically problematic ... then even a positive verdict would seem to offer no prospect of increasing our understanding." (p. 158) Stroud presents a carefully argued, lucid and scholarly defence of his thesis, applying it first to causation, then to necessity and finally to value. Kantian themes and problems pervade this book, so it is no surprise to find Hume and his latter-day followers as the chosen protagonists for the deflationary accounts of modality and value Stroud sets out to oppose.