Constructivist Facts as the Bridge Between Is and Ought Draft version. Jaap Hage1 jaap.hage@maastrichtuniversity.nl www.jaaphage.nl ABSTRACT This article describes how the facts in social reality take an intermediate position between objective facts and purely subjective ‘facts’. These social facts can in turn be subdivided into constructivist and non-constructivist facts. The defining difference is that non-constructivist facts are completely determined by a consensus between the members of a social group, while constructivist facts are founded in such a consensus but can nevertheless be questioned. Ought fact are such constructivist facts. Because they are founded in social reality, a naturalistic theory of ought facts is attractive. Because constructivist facts are always open to questioning, we have an explanation why the facts of social reality may found ought facts, but are nevertheless not the final word about them. Keywords: Constructivist facts, Is, Ought, Social reality 1 What is the issue? “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it's necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.” (Hume 1978, p. 469) This fragment from Hume’s Treatise has become the starting point of endless debates about Is and Ought, the alleged fundamental difference between the two, and the possibility to derive oughtstatements from only is-statements (Brecht 1959). The debates have not only been endless, but they are often also vague or confused. For instance, they often lack precise circumscriptions of what belongs to the realms of Is and Ought, or what is meant by derivation, or by possibility. In this article I will make another attempt to show how the alleged gap 1 I want to thank the participants in the webinar on Global Semiotics (16 September 2021) for their stimulating remarks and questions. between Is and Ought can be bridged, or – more precisely – why there is no gap that needs to be bridged in the first place. Before outlining my main argument, I want to discard two possible misunderstandings. First, I do not claim that there is no difference between judgments such as ‘John ought to stop for the traffic light’ and judgments such as ‘John is approaching a red traffic light’. Clearly, ought-judgments differ from non-ought-judgments and statements of the former category cannot be deduced from only statements of the latter category. However, there is nothing spectacular about this impossibility and the impossibility is certainly no evidence for some kind of gap, logical or ontological. It is nothing other than the impossibility to deduce information about one topic from information about another topic. The same impossibility also prohibits the deduction of statements about tables from only statements about chairs. Going by the quotation, Hume might agree with this. In the previous paragraph, I wrote, just like Hume in the quotation above, about deduction and not about the more general notion of derivation. This has a reason, and the reason is that the notion of deduction, as used in modern logic, is narrower than the notion of derivation. Neither notion has a generally accepted definition, but the demands on deduction are, contrary to those on derivation, typically very strict. Not all derivations which are acceptable, are deductively valid.2 It is therefore not excluded beforehand that ought-judgments can be derived in an acceptable manner from non-oughtjudgments, without the derivation being deductively valid. As a matter of fact, I hope to show in the argument that follows that it is possible to derive ought-statements in an acceptable manner from statements that do not include an ought. Although the present article has implications for how we should conceive logic, its topic is not the philosophy of logic.3 Its topic is in the field of what has recently become known as ‘social ontology’, the theory about how social reality exists. The main lines of the argument are as follows. There are many facts that depend for their existence on being recognised, directly or indirectly, by human beings. These fact are elements of social reality and are for that reason called ‘social facts’. Some social facts are special in the sense that their existence does not only depend on what people actually recognise, but also what people rationally ought to recognise, or – what is assumed to be the same thing – on what these facts ought to be. These are the constructivist facts mentioned in the title of this article. So, in a sense that requires much explanation, constructivist facts are facts which are what they ought to be. And to make things more complicated, what the constructivist facts ought to be also depends on what people actually recognise. Constructivist facts depend for their existence on a complex intertwining of what people recognise and what they ought to recognise and in that way they bridge the alleged gap between Is and Ought. This article consists mainly of the explanation of how social reality in general, and constructivist facts in particular, exist. Because of its topic, which focuses on the Is/Ought gap, there will be special 2 3 An important case of ‘acceptable’ arguments that are not deductive, or deductively valid, are arguments that have rules as one or more premises. Deductive validity is typically defined in terms of the truth values of the premises and the conclusion of arguments, and rules have no truth values because they do not describe. Therefore, rule-applying arguments cannot be deductively valid (nor deductively invalid, for that matter). The implications of the theory about constructivist facts for the philosophy of logic are explored in another article with the pretentious provisional title ‘What is a good argument?’. That article is being written simultaneously with the present one, and has not been published yet. attention to the question of how ought-facts are part of social reality. Section 2 contains some preliminaries about language, the World (in a technical sense) and the nature of rules. Section 3 discusses objective, subjective and social facts, with emphasis on the latter category. Section 4 addresses the very question of what Is and Ought are, and section 5 introduces the most basic form of social facts, which I will conveniently call ‘basic social facts’. The more sophisticated version of social facts is based on rules and these facts will therefore be called ‘rule-based facts’ in section 6. Section 7 is devoted to ought-facts. Section 8 discusses a special category of social facts, the constructivist facts, and their complex mode of existence. This section concludes the foundational work of this article and allows section 9 to conclude the article by showing the implications of the argument for Moore’s open question argument, the natural fallacy, and the possibilities to derive Ought from Is and Is from Ought. 2 Preliminaries 2.1 Language and the World First it is important to distinguish between language and the World. I will use ‘the World’ as a technical term that stands for two collections: the collection of all facts and the collection of all things. I will focus on the facts. All facts are language-dependent, because every fact is the fact that …, where the dots need to be filled in by a statement (Strawson 1950). Examples are the facts that the sun shines, or that 33 equals 27. Statements are obviously language-dependent, and so are facts because they are statementdependent. However, facts do not only depend on language, but also on the World. Only true statements express facts, and what makes statements true is their correspondence to the facts.4 All statements express states of affairs, but only statements that are true have corresponding facts. So we have a complicated relation between language, facts and the World. Only the existence of a language makes it possible to distinguish facts in the World, and at the same time the World is defined in terms of the facts (and things) that are language-dependent. A language determines by means of the statements it makes possible, what states of affairs can exist. The phrase ‘state of affairs’ has a technical meaning too: it stands for a possible fact and this possibility is created by a language that allows to formulate the state of affairs. The World, in its turn, makes the difference between states of affairs that are facts (in the World) and states of affairs that have not been realised in the World and are therefore not facts (Textor 2021). This is a brief argument, but an argument with far-reaching implications. One implication is that there cannot be facts which are completely mind-independent. Only when minds have appeared in the course of evolution and these minds have developed a language, is it possible to identify the World as the collection of facts and things. A second implication is that language determines what kinds of entities can count as facts. If a language does not distinguish on grammatical grounds between the sentences ‘Karl walks’, ‘Karl ought to walk’, and ‘It is uncertain whether Karl walks’, and in this way treats all three sentences as statements, the language makes what all these sentences express, if true, 4 The definition of facts in terms of both a language and the World takes away a major objection against correspondence theories of truth, namely that the nature of facts is obscure. See the discussion of the correspondence theory of truth in Kirkham 1992, p. 119-140. In the classificatory scheme for correspondence theories developed there, the theory of truth proposed here is a non-realist correspondence theory. into facts. It will, therefore, not do to claim that the second of these sentences cannot express a fact because the sentence is an ought-sentence. Such a manoeuvre is excluded by taking language and grammatical form as determinative for what can count as a fact.5 6 2.2 Kinds of rules Rules are ‘things’; they are not facts that can be described by true statements7, nor are they statements which can be true or false. That rules are things is suggested by the facts that rules can: - be quantified over, as in ‘He forgot all the rules that he learned at school’; - be created or repealed, for instance by Parliament; - exist or not exist, as in ‘The rule that forbids homosexual practices does not exist anymore’. It is sometimes thought that rules are about prescribing behaviour.8 Admittedly, many rules do, in a sense, prescribe behaviour; these are mandatory or duty-imposing rules. However, many rules do not prescribe at all. Let us consider some examples of rules. 1. The moment that the President dies, the Vice-President becomes the new President. This is a rule about succession. It operates in time and attaches a new fact – the person who happened to be the Vice-President is the (new) President – to the occurrence of an event: the (old) President died. 2. Statutes are created by Parliament. This rule attributes the exclusive competence to create statutes to Parliament. In doing so, it attaches a fact – this entity has the competence to create statutes – to another fact: this entity is Parliament. 3. A bachelor is an unmarried man of marriageable age. This rule both defines the meaning of a word, and at the same time conceptually connects two kinds of entities: bachelors and unmarried men of marriageable age. 5 6 Of course, my choice of letting language and grammatical form determine what states of affairs and facts there can be, can be contested. After all, language may be misleading. However, somebody who disagrees takes the burden to explain why her distinction between facts and non-facts deviates from what grammatical form suggests. Things are also language-dependent, because a thing is necessarily some kind of thing (Deutsch and Garbacz 2018), for instance a car, a human being, a number, or a chimaera. Kinds are singled out by predicates denoting them, such as ‘rule’, ‘car’, or ‘property right’. Predicates, and therefore also the kinds which they denote, are language-dependent and things are language-dependent because they depend for their individuation on kinds. 7 8 Actually, this opposition between facts which are denoted by descriptive sentences and rules which are denoted by terms is more complicated than may seem at first sight. By introducing terms (‘state of affairs’, ‘fact’) for truth bearers, the truth bearers are objectified. Still they differ from rules, which are not objectified truth bearers. Thanks to Paolo di Lucia for drawing my attention to the complications. This confusion is strengthened by using the notion of normativity for both situations involving prescriptions of behaviour and situations that involve rules (Hage 2015 and 2020). 4. If two or more parties conclude a valid contract, everything in the contract holds between the contract partners. This is a (strongly simplified) rule about the consequences of a contract. These consequences often – but not always – involve mutual obligations, but the rule does not mention them explicitly (Hage 2018a, p. 97-102). Neither does the rule mention duties or permissions. Therefore, we cannot say that it is a mandatory rule, even though its application will often lead to obligations. 5. Car drivers must stop at red traffic lights. This is a typical mandatory rule. It imposes a duty – to stop – on agents that belong to a particular category – car drivers. Notice that the duty itself, e.g. that Henry must stop at this red traffic light, is not a rule. The duty is an ‘thing’, and the existence of this duty is a fact, described by a true statement. This fact is attached by the rule to other facts, namely that Henry is a car driver and that the traffic light before Henry is red. By attaching this fact to the other facts, the rule creates a new duty, which exists as a result of being attached to facts. Although sometimes the application of a rule leads to a duty or an obligation, there is no inherent or conceptual relation between rules and the guidance of behaviour. There are different kinds of rules, but the common element which makes them all rules is not that they guide behaviour, but that they attach facts to other facts. In this sense, all rules, including so-called ‘regulative rules’ are constitutive (Hage 2015, 2018c). A rule is a general connection between kinds of facts, which attaches the presence of facts of kind B to the presence of facts of the kind A.9 If a rule exists, it attaches its consequences to the already existing facts. People who do not recognise these consequences, for instance by not believing that 3+5 equals 8, make a mistake and what they do is in that sense wrong. However, this wrong is not the wrong of the violation of a duty, but merely the wrong of misapplying, or not applying, a rule. So, the rules that govern addition do not prescribe to give the correct answers to additions. However, they make it the case that, rationally speaking, people ought to recognise that the sum of 3 and 5 equals 8. In that way, they also bring about that the answer of 7 to the question of what 3+5 equals to, is wrong. If rules are applied, the World comes to fit the content of the rule. For instance, application of the rule about the succession of the President makes the old Vice-President into the new President. Or, application of the rule that car drivers must halt at red traffic lights imposes the duty to halt on a car driver who approaches a red traffic light. Or, being an unmarried man of marriageable age makes it the case that a person is a bachelor.10 Based on their effects, it is possible to distinguish two main kinds of rules: dynamic rules and static rules. A dynamic rule attaches a new fact to the occurrence of an event, or takes an existing fact away or modifies it. The rules (1) and (4) above are examples of dynamic rules. An example of a dynamic 9 10 Obviously, this definition of rules is much broader than other ways of characterising rules, such as in the opposition between rules and principles. Readers should be careful not to apply everything that is written about rules here blindly to other discussions about rules, or the other way around. This is the so-called ‘world-to-word direction of fit’ of rules. Directions of fit play an important role in the work of Searle, and the present account of rules was developed in interaction with Searle’s developing ideas on this topic. There are, however, major differences, which are implicitly discussed in Hage 2018a, p. 59-62. rule that takes a fact away would be the rule that a right of usufruct ends as soon as the right-holder passes away. A static rule attaches a fact to an already existing fact. The rules (2), (3) and (5) above are all static rules. It is possible to subdivide the category of static rules into counts-as rules and fact-to-fact rules. A counts-as rule makes that an entity of one kind is also an entity of another kind. Rule 3 above is such a counts-as rule. An unmarried man of marriageable age counts as a bachelor. A fact-to-fact rule attaches a fact to some other fact. This category of static rules is exemplified by the rules (2) and (5) above. If an entity happens to be Parliament, it also has the competence to create statutes. 3 Objective, subjective and social facts The World is composed of things and facts. Things are denoted by terms (e.g. proper names, nouns, or definite descriptions), such as a car, a sea, a right of ownership, the Maastricht Cycling Club, or the king of the Belgians. Facts are those aspects of the World that are described by true statements. They include the facts that my car is green, that Philippe is the king of the Belgians, that 3+5 equals 8, or – more controversial, because subjective – that chocolate tastes good. If nobody would believe that the United Nations existed, the United Nations would not exist. In this respect, the United Nations differ from Alpha Centauri, the solar system that is closest to that of Earth. Alpha Centauri existed even before there were any human beings to know about it. The Belgian chess champion can only exist if he is recognised as such, but for every person taken individually, he is the chess champion, whether they believe it or not. The same holds for the ownership of my car. If I were the only person to recognise it, I would not be the owner; if sufficient many recognise that I am the owner, this ownership exists also for those few individuals who do not recognise it. The three examples illustrate the existence of entities whose existence depends on recognition. I will describe this situation by saying that these entities exist in the social World, a part of the full World. As a first indication of what social facts are, it is useful to contrast them to objective facts and subjective ‘facts’. Objective facts are facts that exist independent of whether people believe in their existence.11 Examples of objective facts that spring to mind are the facts that the Pacific contains water, that 3+5 equals 8, or that most human beings have lungs. Because objective facts do not depend on what people believe, they are the same for everybody, even if people have different beliefs about them. If two persons disagree about an objective fact, at least one of them must be wrong. Subjective ‘facts’ are completely personal. Many people would not even want to call them ‘facts’, because of their personal nature. Examples are that Carla is a pretty woman, that chocolate tastes good, or that Johann Sebastian Bach was a better composer than Paul Hindemith. Because subjective ‘facts’ are so personal, disagreements about these facts will be common, and in such a case it makes little sense to ask who is right. If Joanna prefers white wine and Frédéric prefers red wine, they are both right with regard to their own preference. Subjective facts depend completely on what individual people believe or find, and in this sense everybody has her own subjective ‘reality’. 11 In section 5.2 I will claim that whether a particular kind of fact is objective is a matter of meta-beliefs. If people do not believe in objective facts, this may mean that – for those people – there are no objective facts. Social facts take an intermediate position between objective and subjective facts. They depend on what people recognise, but not on individual recognition. This means that people may disagree on what the social facts are, for instance on whether Philippe is really the king of the Belgians. However, if all Belgians agree on who their king is, it does not make sense to ask whether they are right. For every individual person, social facts are like objective facts: they exist whether people recognise them or not. However, for a whole group, social facts are like subjective facts: it depends on what the members of the group believe these facts are. Different groups may have different social facts, as different countries may have different systems of positive law. The following figure gives a brief overview of the conceptual distinctions that were made above. The World Facts The Things World … Rules Figure 1: Facts and things … Objective Social Subjective facts facts facts 4 What are ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’? In discussions of the alleged gap between Is and Ought, it is typically assumed that it is clear what is meant by ‘Is’ and by ‘Ought’. However, one reason why the discussions are often unfruitful is that it is not at all clear what is meant by these terms. ‘Ought’ is the easier case. There are, it seems, two main kinds of ought: ought to be (Sein Sollen) and ought to do (Tun Sollen) (Castañeda 1972). Examples of ought to be are that a letter ought to be stamped, or that parents ought to be silent when their children are talking. Examples of ought to do are that Enide ought to stamp her letter before posting it, or that Bart’s parents ought not to shout if Bart is talking. An ought sometimes belongs to a point of view, such as the points of view of law, morality, or reason. This division over points of view is orthogonal to the distinction between ought to be and ought to do. For instance, mathematically the outcome of the addition of 3 and 5 ought to be 8, or mathematically John ought to arrive at 8 when adding 5 to 3. Legally, the tax declaration ought to be submitted on the first of June and morally, Alice ought to give the beggar some money. Notice that value judgments do not express an ought, not even when actions are evaluated as good or bad. If a particular action would be good, this may be a reason why the action ought to be performed, but logically it is possible that an agent ought to perform a bad action, or that the best possible action is forbidden and ought not to be performed (Heyd 2019). The Fact/Value gap – if there is one – is therefore not the same as the Is/Ought gap (Hage 2016). ‘Is’ is more difficult than ‘Ought’. Ought-judgements typically – although not always – make use of the auxiliary verb ‘ought’. Many judgments that do not use the words ‘is’ or ‘are’ are nevertheless deemed to express an ‘Is’. For instance, both ‘John is walking’ and ‘John walks’ are deemed to express an ‘Is’, just as ‘The train is late’ and ‘The train will certainly be late’. Apparently, whether something counts as an ‘Is’ does not depend on the words used to express it. Regrettably, it is not at all clear on what it does depend. It is tempting to qualify only objective facts as belonging to the sphere of ‘Is’. However, then the fact that it is certain that the train will be late would not belong to the sphere of ‘Is’ because it is modal and therefore mind-dependent.12 Here, I will assume that the sphere of ‘Is’ is not well-defined in common parlance, and that we need a partly stipulative definition of what belongs to this sphere. I propose the following definition: The sphere of ‘Is’ consists of the World. This means that the sphere of ‘Is’ encompasses precisely all facts and things. Notice that this broad definition of the sphere of ‘Is’ makes it possible that ought-facts, if they exist, belong to the sphere of ‘Is’. Of course, it is possible to give a narrower definition of ‘Is’, for instance by making an exception for ought-facts. However, for a discussion about the alleged gap between ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’, this exclusion by definition has – to quote Bertrand Russell – ‘all the advantages of theft over honest toil’. For this reason, I will continue working from the assumption that ought-facts may be a subset of the World and therefore may belong to the sphere of Is. 12 Here, I assume that all modal facts are mind-dependent. See White 1975 for a discussion of modalities supporting my view. ‘May’, because there is still need for an explanation of the way in which ought-facts can exist and for an answer to the question of whether they can be ‘derived’ from facts that do not include an ought. To provide such an explanation and to answer this question, we need to delve deeper into the nature of social facts in general, and constructivist facts in particular. 5 Basic social facts 5.1 Recognition Social facts exist relative to (for) a group. For MCC, Hendrik is their leader, but for the United Nations, António Guterres is the leader (Secretary-General). The members of MCC are decisive for who is the leader of this club, while the members of the United Nations are decisive for who is their SecretaryGeneral. Many social facts are the products of rules – they are rule-based or institutional facts – but for a proper understanding of social reality it is better to start with basic social facts. As a first approximation, basic social facts exist in a group if most members of that group believe that they exist. For instance, Hendrik is the leader of the Maastricht Cycling Club (MCC) if most members of that club believe that Hendrik is their leader. For some kinds of basic social facts, it does not suffice if sufficiently many members of a group believe them. Suppose, for instance, that all members of MCC believe that Hendrik is their leader, but do not attach any consequences to this belief. If Hendrik proposes to take a break during a cycling trip, this proposal is treated like the proposal of any other club member. If such a situation would occur, it cannot be said that Hendrik is the leader of MCC. Apparently, the club members do not realise what it means to be the leader of a club, and they ‘believe’ something which they do not fully understand or appreciate. To have a leader for a club means not only that sufficiently many club members believe that (s)he is the leader, but also that they attach the relevant consequences to this believed leadership. What these consequences are, depends on how the notion of leadership is given content in MCC, but there cannot be leadership without any consequences. We find that some kinds of basic social facts can only exist if their consequences are accepted, while for other kinds of basic social facts mere belief satisfies. It is convenient to introduce a technical term that stands for belief if that is all that is required for the existence of a basic social fact, but that includes acceptance if that is an additional requirement. I propose to use the words ‘recognise’ and ‘recognition’ to this purpose. From here on, ‘recognition’ stands for belief, or for belief and acceptance, depending on what is required for the existence of the basic social fact in question. 5.2 Meta-beliefs Suppose that all members of MCC recognise that Hendrik is the leader of the club, but are not aware that the other members do the same. Individually, they are all disposed to follow the directives of Hendrik about destinations, breaks or departure times, but at the same time they are surprised that the others also follow Hendrik’s suggestions. In such a case, we cannot say that Hendrik is (already) the leader of the group. More is needed, and this more includes that the group members should be aware that Hendrik fulfils the same function for most other members that Hendrik has for them personally. It should not only be the case that sufficiently many members of MCC recognise Hendrik as their leader, they should also believe that sufficiently many other members also recognise Hendrik as leader of the group, and that these other members have the same beliefs about their fellow cyclists. In other words, a group member P should not only have beliefs about Hendrik, but also about what her fellow group members believe and accept, including what her fellow group members believe about the beliefs of P herself. The beliefs of P should include indirectly – namely via the beliefs of her group fellows – meta-beliefs about her own beliefs. I will call these beliefs reflexive meta-beliefs, reflexive because these meta-beliefs are about the believer’s own beliefs. Reflexive meta-beliefs are crucial for the existence of basic social facts, but there are other important meta-beliefs. Imagine we are in the early Middle-Ages, a time at which most people believed Earth to be flat.13 Moreover, these people not only believed Earth to be flat, but also that others believed both that Earth is flat and that all others believed the same. In other words, sufficiently many members of the group consisting of all humanity believed Earth to be flat and also entertained the reflexive metabeliefs necessary for Earth’s being flat to exist as a basic social fact. Can we therefore say that in the early Middle-Ages, Earth was flat as a matter of basic social fact? No, we cannot, and the reason is that another important meta-belief was lacking. Also in the early Middle-Ages, people believed that whether Earth is flat is a matter of objective fact. In these days, people would not only believe that Earth was flat, but also that if in a different society people would believe that Earth was round, those people would be wrong, objectively wrong. People who thought that the flatness of Earth was something to be established by consensus in a group would not understand what kind of fact the shape of Earth was. Something similar would hold if one member of MCC claimed that, even though all other members recognise Hendrik as their leader, Hendrik was objectively speaking not their leader. This single person would show by his claim that he did not understand that being the leader of an informal club is a matter of basic social fact and that it does not make sense to talk about ‘objective leadership’. The point that these examples are meant to illustrate is that something can only exist as a particular kind of fact (objective, social, or subjective) if it is a social fact that it belongs to this kind of fact. So, Hendrik can only be the leader of MCC if sufficiently many members of MCC recognise him as the leader and if they consider leadership to be a matter of social fact. Obviously, it cannot be expected from all members of a cycling club that they distinguish between objective, social and subjective facts and we should not expect all members to have an opinion on whether group leadership is a matter of social fact. However, implicitly, most people distinguish between facts that are ‘objective’, facts that are purely ‘subjective’, and facts that are somewhat in between. The relevant meta-belief may therefore be formulated slightly differently: something can only exist as a social fact, if people do not believe it to be an objective or purely subjective fact. 5.3 When does a basic social fact exist? Based on the discussion in the previous sub-sections, we can formulate the following conditions for the existence of a basic social fact: 13 Actually it is not at all clear that most people believed this. Likely, most schooled people believed also in those days that Earth is round. Cf. DeWitt 2018, Worldviews, p. 82. Of course, the percentage of schooled people was much smaller in the Middle-Ages. F exists as a basic social fact in social group G, if and only if: a. sufficiently many members of G recognise the existence of F, b. it is not a basic social fact in G that facts like F are either objective facts or subjective facts, and c. sufficiently many of these members of G have the relevant reflexive meta-beliefs about F existing as a basic social fact in G. 6 Rule-based facts 6.1 Social rules; existence and efficacy The next category of social facts are rule-based facts. I will argue that there are two kinds of rule-based facts, namely facts based on social rules and facts based on rule-based rules. The most basic form of existence for rules is existence as a social rule. Later I will define the existence of social rules as their efficacy. To make this definition understandable, I first need to say something about on one hand the efficacy of duties and on the other hand the efficacy of rules. A duty is efficacious, if and only if the duty-holder tends to do what it is his duty to do. For instance, the duty for Gerald to wear a hat in church is efficacious if Gerald tends to wear a hat in church. Many rules do not impose duties, and this definition of the efficacy of duties can therefore not be used for rules. A definition of efficacy for rules should refer to what rules do, namely attach facts to other facts. Therefore, I propose the following definition for the efficacy of a rule: A rule is efficacious in a group if sufficiently many members of the group are disposed to recognise the fact of the rule consequence if they believe the facts of the rule conditions. The fact of the rule consequence can, but need not be, the existence of some duty. For example, the rule that car drivers must stop for red traffic lights is efficacious in a group if and only if sufficiently many members of the community who believe that a person is a car driver approaching a traffic light recognise that this person should stop. The rule of inference that it will rain if the weather forecast predicts rain is efficacious in a group if and only if sufficiently many members of the group tend to believe that it will rain in case they believe that the weather forecast predicts rain. A social rule exists in a group if sufficiently many members of the group are disposed to recognise the rule consequence if they believe the facts of the rule conditions. For instance, if most people in Belgium are disposed to believe that it will rain if they believe that the weather forecasts predicted rain, then the social rule exists in Belgium that (we should assume that) it will rain if the weather forecast predicted rain. Another example deals with a duty-imposing rule. If most members of the Maastricht Cycling Club normally recognise the duty to do what the leader of the club told them to, the social rule exists in MCC that if the leader says that you must do something, you have a duty to do it. This definition of when a social rule exists identifies the existence and the efficacy of a social rule, and implies that all existing social rules are efficacious and that a social rule will stop to exist if it loses its efficacy. A direct consequence of this characterisation of social rules and their existence is that members of a group who do not recognise the consequences of social rules make a mistake, at least in the eyes of the other group members. This perceived mistake may lead to social pressure to recognise the ruleconsequences, and to (self)criticism (Hart 2012, p. 88/9). Notice, however, that this ‘internal aspect’ of rules is not intrinsically connected to mandatory rules. Rules that prescribe behaviour may lead to (self)criticism in case of non-compliance, but the same holds for rules that govern addition, the succession of presidents, or the use of words. 6.2 Rule-based rules Rules attach ‘new’ facts to existing facts or to events. One special kind of rule-based fact are the facts holding that a particular entity exists. Let us assume that the rule exists that the team that has scored most goals is the winner of the soccer match. On the assumption that Team A scored more goals than Team B, this rule brings about that Team A is the winner of the soccer match. The winner exists because of the mentioned rule, and the winner is therefore called a rule-based entity. There are very many rule-based entities, such as the Dean of the Law School, a bank note, a property right, a legal obligation, and the United Nations. However, for our present purpose, the most important entities are rules that exist because they were created, rule-based rules. Rule-based rules can exist anywhere in society where there are rules that specify how new rules can come about. For instance, MCC may have the rule that the finance committee of the club in its annual meeting can make rules on the yearly contribution members have to pay. If the finance committee uses this power, it makes rule-based rules. However, by far most rule-based rules exist in law. Apart from rules of so-called customary law, which are best seen as social rules, legal rules typically come about through creation. This creation takes place in a legislative procedure, or – if court decisions have the official status of precedents – in a court procedure. If the procedure was followed correctly, a dynamic rule attaches the existence of one or more rules to the occurrence of this event. These rules exist, whether they are followed (efficacious) or not. Here lies a major difference with social rules, which depend for their existence on their efficacy. Rule-based rules can exist without being efficacious, and therefore they can generate consequences which are not broadly accepted. In the Netherlands such a rule arguably exists with regard to traffic lights for pedestrians. If a traffic light for pedestrians is red, pedestrians are not allowed to cross the street. However, many pedestrians ignore the rule. They do not feel bound by it and make their crossing behaviour dependent on the intensity of the traffic, or the presence of a police officer. Despite this massive lack of recognition, the rule about traffic lights does create legal duties and a pedestrian who crosses the street while the traffic light is red violates the law and becomes liable to be punished. In general, it is possible to distinguish with regard to rule-based rules between two kinds of validity and efficacy. Rule-based rules are typically the result of rule-creation, for instance by means of legislation. A legislative product is valid if it came about in the proper way. Typically, this will mean that the product was created by a body that has the power to do so and by means of the correct procedure for legislation. If a piece of legislation came about in the proper way, it is by definition valid in the sense of being based on a proper source. We may call this source validity and this source validity applies to both the legislative product as well as the rules that stem from it. So, legal rules will typically be source-valid. The second form of validity is validity as mode of existence for rules. This will be called the rule’s ‘binding force’ (Hage 2018b). A rule that binds in this sense normally attaches legal consequences to those fact situations that match its conditions.14 It should be noted in this connection that the binding force of rules has nothing to do with the question of whether rules impose duties or obligations. The binding force of rules is nothing other than that the rules attach legal consequences, of any kind, to the facts that match their conditions. For instance, if the rules that skate boards counts as vehicles for the purpose of the Traffic Act is binding, this means nothing other than that for the purpose of the Traffic Act particular skate boards counts as vehicles. In the case of social rules the consequences exist because they are recognised and then the binding force of these rules coincides with their efficacy. We have seen that this may be different for rulebased rules, and with respect to these rules it is possible to distinguish between their validity in the sense of their binding force and their efficacy. The efficacy depends on the recognition of the legal consequences; the binding force of these rules will typically depend on their source validity. If we reconsider the Dutch rule about traffic lights for pedestrians from this perspective. we obtain the following results. The rule was created by means of legislation by the government (a by-law) and on the assumptions that the government was delegated the power to make such rules and that it followed the correct procedure, the rule is source-valid. This source-validity is the reason why the rule is also valid in the sense that it has binding force. This means in the case of this mandatory rule that the rule imposes duties on pedestrians. These duties exist, independent of whether they are recognised. A third issue is whether the rule is efficacious. It is efficacious if Dutch pedestrians recognise their duties imposed by the rule. In the case of duties, recognition involves a disposition to comply. Therefore, in this example, the rule is efficacious if the duties imposed by the rule are efficacious. Notice that this efficacy does not depend on either the source validity of the rule or on the rule’s binding force. However, if the rule is efficacious without being source-valid, the rule is a social rule, not a rule-based rule. 7 Ought-facts Earlier, I indicated that, next to objective facts which are by definition mind-independent, there are also social facts which depend on the minds of the members of a social group. Of course, it is possible to define facts in a narrow way, to allow only objective facts as ‘real’ facts, but that would also exclude as facts that the United Nations exist, as well as the facts that John the thief is punishable (a disposition), that it is certain that the train will be late, or that Harry cannot play chess (an epistemic and an anankastic modality, respectively). Many more kinds of fact than we may initially think are mind-dependent, including all the existence of all dispositions and all modalities, and if we disallow all these to be facts, the notion of a fact will become much narrower than our actual use of it. If it is recognised that facts do not need to be objective, but that they can be mind-dependent, it should become easier to accept the idea that some facts are about what ought to be the case, or about what ought to be done. After all, ought- facts are also a kind of modalities, in particular deontic modalities. Ought-facts are mind-dependent, but facts nevertheless. So, let us assume that oughtfacts are mind-dependent, and then there are two possibilities. Either they are purely subjective, or 14 Reasoning with rules is more complicated than the syllogism as which it is often presented. These complications can bring about that a binding rule does not lead to its usual consequences. See Hage 1997, p. 78-129 and Hage, Waltermann and Arosemena 2020. they are social facts. Perhaps some ought-facts are purely subjective, for instance if I impose some duties on myself. However, other ought-facts exist independent of whether you personally recognise them. Those facts are social facts; they exist in social reality. Some facts in social reality are basic social facts, but many others are rule-based. Ought-facts belong to the latter category, because they ‘supervene’ on other facts. A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties (McLaughlin and Bennett 2021). For example, the property of being a bachelor supervenes on the properties of being male, unmarried and of marriageable age. Or, John’s being punishable supervenes on John’s being a thief. If an agent ought to perform some kind of action, there are reasons why the agent ought to do so. If all the reasons why an agent ought, or ought not, to do something are taken into consideration, it is not possible that the normative position of the agent with regard to this kind of action changes without there being a change in the set of all these reasons. For example, there are reasons why Alice ought to give money to a beggar, and also reasons why she ought not do that. If the reasons are balanced, the outcome may be that Alice ought to give money to the beggar. Because this ought supervenes on the reasons for and against it, it is not possible that Alice is released from what she ought to do, without there being a change in the set of underlying (subvening) reasons. The fashionable term to express the relation between a supervening fact and its subvening facts is “grounding” (Epstein 2015, p. 74-87). The reasons why an agent ought to perform some action are said to ground this fact. Earlier, I defined rules as follows: A rule is a general connection between kinds of facts, which attaches the presence of facts of kind B to the presence of facts of the kind A. Given this broad definition of rules, the relation between subvening and supervening facts is often given with a rule. The facts mentioned in the rule conditions ground the supervening fact mentioned in the rule conclusion. A notion that is closely related to grounding is anchoring. There is no broadly accepted definition of anchoring yet, but a good working definition seems to be that a rule is anchored in facts which make that the rule exists. For instance, the rule that bachelors are unmarried men of marriageable age is anchored in the facts that this rule is used by native speakers of the English language. Or, the rule that thieves are punishable is, in the Netherlands, anchored in Section 310 of the Criminal Code.15 I pay attention to grounding and anchoring in relation to ought-facts, because these two notions are important for the question of how the alleged gap between Is and Ought can be bridged. Even if it is taken for granted that there are ought-facts and that these ought-facts, being facts, also belong to the sphere of Is, it may still be questioned whether it is possible to move from the facts that ground an ought-fact to the supervening ought-fact. Is it possible to derive from the facts that Alice is rich and the beggar is poor that Alice ought to donate some of her money to the beggar (assuming that these are all the relevant facts)? That the latter facts ground the former ought-fact is given with the existence of the rule that if one person is rich and another person poor, the former should give some of his money to the latter. 15 A predecessor of the relation between grounding and anchoring can be found in the distinction made by Toulmin (1958, p. 97-113) between data supporting a claim (the counterpart of grounding) and a backing supporting a warrant (the counterpart of anchoring). However, does this rule really exist? Moreover, is the existence of this rule a matter of fact that can be discovered by inspecting social reality? Or does this rule express an ought that can never be anchored in social reality alone, without support from some underlying ought?16 These questions lead us to the central issue of this article’s argument: is it possible to anchor rules that underly ought-facts in social reality? Is it possible to naturalise mandatory rules? The answer lies in constructivist facts. 8 Constructivist facts 8.1 Introducing constructivist facts In the brief discussion of legal validity, above, we already saw that sometimes a legal rule that was created in a valid manner, that is source valid, does nevertheless not lead to its ordinary legal consequences. In this connection there are two possibilities. One is that the rule has its ordinary binding force and normally leads to its usual legal consequences, but not in a particular, exceptional, case. This is a topic that has become fashionable in the 1990s under the heading of the defeasibility of legal reasoning. The other possibility is that the rule never leads to any legal consequences; the rule is not binding at all, even though it was validly created. Some would claim that this is the case with highly unjust laws. Here, I am not interested in the circumstances under which a source valid law is not binding, but only in the theoretical possibility that this is the case. The two situations, that a rule is not binding at all, or that there is an exception to it in special circumstances, both illustrate the phenomenon that is the central topic of this essay: constructivist facts. Because the phenomenon of constructivist facts does not only occur in law and is, strictly speaking, independent of law, I will start my discussion of constructivist facts with a non-legal example. Suppose that the members of MCC in their annual administrative meetings take a vote on what was the best cycling trip they made this year. Suppose, moreover, that in 2020 they decided unanimously that the trip to the castle gardens in Arcen was the best trip of the year. Does this mean that the Arcen trip really was the best trip? No, even if all club members agree on what was the best trip, this does not mean that it really was the best trip. I remains possible to raise the question of whether all members of the club were mistaken about the best trip. Perhaps, they drank so much alcohol during the really best trip, that they completely forgot about its occurrence. Or, all club members mistakenly feel that the trip with the best weather was the best trip, while some reflection would have made them prefer the trip with the largest number of flat tires, because that trip created the strongest personal ties between the members. There seems to be a difference between what most or even all members of the group accept as the best trip and what really was the best trip. It is interesting to compare this with the leadership of the club. Suppose that MCC does not have a leader as a matter of rule-based fact, but that all members of the club recognise Hendrik as their informal leader. In this case, Hendrik is their informal leader, independent of the quality of the reasons why he is recognised as the leader. In the case of leadership, bad reasons bring about that Hendrik is the leader for bad reasons. In the case of the best cycling trip, 16 This view has become popular in legal theory as the Stufenbautheorie, popularised by Kelsen (1934, 1960). bad reasons for preferring one trip over another mean that the preferred trip was not really the best one. Facts such as the fact about what was the best cycling trip of the year seemingly do not fit in the simple trichotomy of objective, social and subjective facts. They are not objective, because they depend on how people ‘feel’ about things. Neither are they merely subjective, because it makes sense to argue about them. And, finally, they do not seem to be ordinary social facts either, because they are often not based on a rule and nevertheless a broadly shared belief about them is not the final word. I will call such facts constructivist facts. 8.2 Constructivism There are facts which seem like basic or rule-based social facts, but differ from them because it makes sense to question them, even if there is a consensus. The consensus may be wrong, and how is that to be explained if these facts are like ordinary social facts? One possible answer is that the facts in question are determined by reason. They essentially depend on our minds, but they are not subjective. Humans share, in this view, a faculty called reason and this faculty not only helps us arguing about the world, but also brings the truths of reason into existence If some facts are facts because they are determined by reason, this explains why people can seriously disagree about them: some people are not completely reasonable and therefore they make mistakes. Our debates about these facts make sense, because in our exchange of arguments, we become, as a group, more rational, and by debating we can approach the reasonable truth. Mathematics and morality provide us with good example of domains that might be based on reason. In the philosophy of mathematics, mathematical truth is seen by some as the product of reason in the shape of logic. In ethical theory, a prominent branch considers ethical truths as the products of practical reason. This view is called ‘constructivism’ as opposed to ‘realism’. Realism is best interpreted as the view that facts are objective in the sense of mind-independent. A realist in ethical theory believes that there are moral facts which are as objective as the fact that the Pacific Ocean borders on the USA, or the fact that iron is a metal. A constructivist, on the contrary, believes that there are no such moral facts, but that moral facts depend on moral argumentation. The facts are what the best moral argument tells us they are (Rawls 1980; Bagnoli 2021). Constructivism is a form of rationalism, because reason in the form of argumentation determines what the facts are. This is not the place to start a debate on the plausibility of rationalism in mathematics or ethics. I only want to point to an issue connected to traditional rationalism which makes it attractive to consider alternative views. This issue is that there is no clear theory of what reason is. We can point out that some views are (un)reasonable. We can often give reasons why these views are (un)reasonable. However, we are not able to prove, rather than merely claim, that these reasons are good reasons. The constructivism of constructivist facts has a lot in common with constructivism in mathematics or in ethical theory, but emphasizes – in a manner that will still be discussed – that the reason necessary to establish the constructivist facts has a strong foundation in human practices. To state it in an overly simple manner: reason itself is, in a complicated manner, a matter of social fact. 8.3 The possibility of questioning Constructivist facts are social facts, facts that exist because they are recognised as existing, but which are nevertheless open to questioning. How is this combination possible? Actually, the answer is easy: the social practice of a group does not only recognise the existence of these facts, but also the possibility to question them. The possibility of questioning is a social fact, just as much as the fact that may be questioned. If the possibility of questioning a particular kind of fact does not itself exist in social reality, facts of that particular kind are perhaps social facts, but not constructivist facts. This is quite abstract, and it may be useful to consider some examples. Let us start with the best cycling trip. Let us assume that, if interviewed about it, all members of MCC would mention the trip to the castle gardens of Arcen as last year’s best trip of. Moreover, they do not believe this to be an objective matter, because it depends on their appreciation of the trip, but neither do they believe the issue is purely subjective. And, finally, they do not only consider this trip the best one of the year, but they also believe that the other club members feel the same and also know that their feelings are shared by the others. In short, it is a basic social fact in MCC that the trip to the castle gardens of Arcen was the best trip of the year. That is: in first instance, because they also agree and know that the others also agree that, theoretically speaking, everybody might be mistaken. If somebody came up with convincing reasons that another trip was even better, this other trip would be even better. There is an ambiguity in this argument to which I will return later. Let us assume for now, however, that the value judgment about the best cycling trip expresses a constructivist fact. Before turning to the next example, I want to point out that the present example shows that some value judgments express constructivist facts. However, this does not hold for all value judgments. For instance, the value judgment that white wine tastes better than red wine does not express a constructivist fact, not even if everybody would agree about the better taste of white wine. Taste is generally considered to be a subjective matter, and when a matter is considered subjective, it cannot be the topic of a constructivist fact. Some wine aficionados might believe that the taste of wine is an objective matter. Also on that view, the taste is not a matter of constructivist fact. A second example deals with rule-based duties. Assume that the legal system of France has the rule that car drivers must halt at red traffic lights. This rule was created by means of a statute and exists as a matter of rule-based fact. Zala drives her car and approaches a red traffic light. The rule imposes on her a duty to halt, or that would at least be the normal situation. However, Zala brings a severely injured person to the hospital and it is important that they will arrive there as soon as possible. This is a reason to make an exception to the general traffic rule and to conclude that Zala should not stop for the traffic light (assuming, of course, that she does not cause a collision by driving on). This example differs in two respects from the former one about the best cycling trip. First, it deals with a normative judgment – what should Zala do? – rather than with a value judgment. And second, the normal social fact, namely that Zala should stop, would be a rule-based fact, rather than a basic social fact. However, these two differences do not make a difference; it is still possible to argue that the normal situation does not occur, by adducing convincing reasons to this effect. Let us abstract from these examples again. Constructivist facts are characterized by the possibility to have a ‘serious’ debate about them. ‘Serious’ in this connection means that the participants in the debate believe that it is possible to disagree about these facts without thereby showing a misunderstanding of what the debate is about. For instance, if Joanna and Frédéric disagree about whether red wine is better or white wine, they know that their disagreement is not serious, because it is just a matter of taste. In other words: they consider the fact to be a merely subjective one. If two members of MCC disagree about whether Hendrik is their leader, while both know that practically all members of the club accept Hendrik as their leader, their disagreement is not serious. The reason is that not believing that Hendrik is the leader while believing at the same time that ‘everybody’ recognises Hendrik as the leader, shows misunderstanding of the conditions for leadership. The example about the best cycling trip of the year illustrates that it is possible to disagree seriously about what was the best trip. Similarly, it is possible to disagree seriously about whether somebody should donate almost all of his money to Oxfam, for the reason that this maximizes happiness, or whether a parrot which assists a blind person should be classified as a guide dog for the purpose of allowing it in the butcher’s shop. The seriousness of the debate becomes manifest in the assumption of all participants that there is a right answer to some question, even though it is not a matter of objective fact and even if people disagree about what the answer is. The outcome of a potential debate about what the constructivist are matters for what the facts are. The reasons that could be, adduced in the debate contribute to the facts that are the topic of the debate. Earlier (Hage 2012), I described this by claiming that the debate constructs the facts, and not merely reconstructs them, as would be the case in a debate over objective facts. A slightly too simple way of stating the point is that the facts are what the best possible argument claims they are. This constructive role for arguments in determining what the constructivist facts are justifies their name as being constructivist facts. It is time to return to the ambiguity that I pointed out in the example of the best cycling trip. By adducing convincing arguments why the trip that everybody initially thought to be the best one was not really the best one, it turned out to be possible to ‘change’ the facts about the best cycling trip. The ambiguity lies in the role of the arguments. There are three possibilities: a. Because the arguments were adduced, (almost) everybody changed her or his mind, and now the other trip has become the best one because ‘everybody’ recognises it as the best one. b. Because the arguments were adduced, and because the arguments are good, the reasons why the facts are different are, so to speak, ‘available’ and for reason, the other trip has become the best one, even if it is not widely recognised yet. c. Given what the group members already recognise and given what the objective facts are, it would be possible to adduce convincing arguments why another trip is ‘really’ the best, and this mere possibility suffices for making the other trip the best one. Much can be said about these three possibilities (Hage 2000), but here I will confine myself to making a choice without giving more reasons: I adopt possibility 3, although I still need to refine this option a bit. This means that constructivist facts depend both on what is broadly recognised in a social group and on what ought to be recognised given the objective facts and what is already recognised. The word ‘argument’ does not appear in the definition of constructivist facts. Finally, a second complication deserves mentioning. I mentioned that whether a kind of fact is considered to be constructivist depends on the social practice in a group. This needs to be specified: it is not only a social fact; it is even a constructivist fact. So, if ought judgments are considered to describe constructivist fact, this is itself a constructivist facts. It is possible to seriously question whether ought-judgments are constructivist, and alternative views would be that they are purely conventional (non-constructivist social facts), or that they are objective or purely subjective. The debates in the philosophy of mathematics about the plausibility of mathematical constructivism and in ethical theory about constructivism in ethics illustrate this very phenomenon. Constructivism, so to speak, bites its own tail: whether some kind of fact is constructivist is itself a matter of constructivist fact. 8.4 When does a constructivist fact exist? It becomes time to give a more precise account of the conditions for the existence of a constructivist fact. I start with some informal observations, which will for some readers be more informative than the semi-formal characterisation at the end: 1. Constructivist facts are social facts, which means that they are or ought to be17 recognised as social, and not as objective or subjective facts. 2. A constructivist fact is a fact that is recognised as result of the outcome of a rational reconstruction of the set of social facts that are actually recognised in a social group. a. This reconstruction may involve no change for a particular social fact, and then that fact exists as a social fact in the group because it is actually recognised. An example would be that the members of MCC group believe that the cycling trip to the castle gardens of Arcen was the best trip of 2020 and that this belief survives a rational reconstruction of the belief set. Then the belief that the cycling trip to the castle gardens of Arcen was the best trip is in the rationally reconstructed belief set, because it was already in the original belief set and nothing changed in this respect. b. This reconstruction may involve the inclusion a particular social fact, and then that fact exists as a social fact in the group because it ought to be recognised according to the rational reconstruction. An example would be that the members of MCC initially did not have the rule that members of all religious convictions should be treated equally, but that the existence of this rule is included in the rationally reconstructed belief set and the rule therefore already existed. c. This reconstruction may involve the removal of a particular social fact, and then that fact does not exist as a social fact in the group because it ought not to be recognised according to the rational reconstruction. An example would be that the members of MCC group should have recognised that the cycling trip with the largest number of flat tyres was the best trip of 2020 and that they ought not to have recognised the trip to Arcen as the best one. Then the belief that the cycling trip to the castle gardens of Arcen was the best trip is not part of the rationally reconstructed belief set and the trip to Arcen was, everything considered, not the best trip. 3. The rational reconstruction of the belief set of a group takes two factors in the account: the objective facts and the recognised social facts. 17 This insertion ‘or ought to be’ was made to account for the fact that whether a kind of fact is constructivist is itself also a matter of constructivist fact. For instance, if the belief that the cycling trip to the castle gardens of Arcen was the best trip of 2020 was mistaken, but if most members of the group did not realise that, the belief set is reconstructed on the basis of this mistaken belief. However, objectively speaking, the trip with the largest number of flat tires has led to the most personal ties between the group members, something that would have been judged decisive by the members if only they would have realised this fact. Therefore, the result of the reconstruction would, ceteris paribus, be that the original mistaken belief is replaced. Together, these observations lead to the following semi-formal characterization of when a constructivist fact exists: A constructivist fact C exists in a group G if and only if: - facts like C are, or ought to, be recognised in G as constructivist facts; - C is an element of f(F  I), where • F is the set of all objective facts; • I is the initial set of social facts recognised in G; • - f is the function that rationally reconstructs the combination (join) of the objective facts F and the initial social facts into a new set of social facts; the function f includes a fact A in its outcome (value) if either: • A is an old social fact in G (A  I) and it is not so that A ought not to be recognised in G; or • A ought to be recognised in G. It is on purpose left unspecified when precisely a fact ought (not) to be recognised in a social group, as this would involve many epistemological technicalities. However, an important constraint is that ought-facts are themselves constructivist facts which can only exist in a group if either they are broadly recognised, or they ought to be recognised. This means that all ought-facts that exist in a social group must in last instance have a foundation in (other) facts that are either objective, or are recognised by the group. 8.5 A table of kinds of facts The following table gives an overview of the different kinds of facts that were distinguished. The table may be read as a partial expansion of the schema presented in section 3. FACTS Objective facts Basic social facts Constructivist Non-constructivist Social facts Rule-based facts Facts based on Facts based on rulesocial rules based rules Constructivist Non-constructivist Constructivist Non-constructivist Subjective ‘facts’ As this table illustrates, the distinction between constructivist and non-constructivist facts applies only to social facts. Within social facts, the distinction constructivist/non-constructivist is orthogonal to the distinction between basic and the two variants on rule-based facts. 9 Some implications It becomes time to take stock of the findings. I will discuss three of them: the (non-existence of the) naturalistic fallacy, the derivation of Ought from Is, and the derivation of Is from Ought. 9.1 Moore’s open question and the naturalistic fallacy In the 1700s, Hume raised the question of whether it is possible to deduce an ought-conclusion from only is-premises. At the beginning of the 20th century, Moore (1903, p. 5-7) presented a brief argument to the effect that it is not possible to give a naturalistic definition of the word ‘good’. The topics addressed by Hume and Moore are quite different. Hume addressed the Is/Ought gap, while Moore wrote about the Fact/Value gap. Moreover, Hume’s issue concerns the possibility of a derivation (deduction), while Moore’s argument deals with the possibility of definition. Despite these differences, Hume’s remark and Moore’s argument are often taken together as addressing the same fundamental issue. If this is indeed the case, Moore’s argument against a naturalistic definition of ‘good’ is relevant for the possibility to derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’. What precisely is Moore’s argument? Moore started from the question what is good and addressed the issue of whether this question could be answered by providing the meaning of the word ‘good’. In this connection he hypothesized that there were a specific answer to the question of what ‘good’ means. Such an answer would – in the spirit of how meaning was conceived in the beginning of the 20th century – consist of an analysis of this meaning in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for being good. And then Moore raises the question of whether something that satisfies these conditions is therefore good by definition. Moore noted that, whatever the proposed analysis might be, this question still makes sense. On the assumption that such a question could not make sense if the analysis would really give the meaning of ‘good’, Moore concluded that it is impossible to specify the conditions for being good by providing the meaning of the word. ‘Good’ cannot be analysed. This argument has become known as the ‘open question argument’, because the answer to the question what is good remains open, whatever answer is hypothesized. Moore himself drew from this argument the conclusion that it is not possible to naturalise ethics by defining the proper subject of ethics – the nature of what is good – in terms of natural properties. Any attempt to do so nevertheless would commit the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Much can, and has been, said about Moore’s argument and the conclusion he drew from it (Ridge 2019). With the conceptual tools developed here, it is perhaps possible to say something new about it. What word is used for which things is purely conventional; another word might have done just as well. Therefore it makes little sense to question the proper use of a word. If I see a horse under normal circumstances and question whether the animal should be called a horse rather than a cow, I thereby show that I do not know what ‘horse’ means. The fact that it is a horse, rather than a cow depends, next to the characteristics of the animal, on a social rule that exists as a matter of non-constructivist fact. This social rule determines what kind of animal is properly called a ‘horse’. For the word ‘good’ as used in ethics, such a social rule does not exist. There may be moral conventions that determine when something counts as good, but these conventions are open to questioning. Why? Because it is a social fact that the standards for goodness are open to questioning, while the standards for counting as a horse are not open in that way. Being good is a matter of constructivist fact – also in many non-moral settings – while being a horse is not. Moore was in this respect right, although the phenomenon he pointed out is not a matter of deep ethical fact, but ‘merely’ our social convention to treat goodness as a matter of constructivist fact. However, all of this has nothing to do with naturalism; in that respect, Moore was not right. Neither has it anything to do with the Fact/Value dichotomy, whatever that may be. 9.2 How to derive Ought from Is? I have already argued that it is not possible to deduce an ought-conclusion from only non-ought premises. That is quite uninteresting, being comparable to the impossibility to deduce a conclusion about tables from premises that only deal with chairs. More interesting is the issue of whether it can be rational to accept an ought-conclusion of the basis of only non-ought reasons. If we take derivation in a broader sense than only deduction, there can be no reasonable doubt that it is possible to derive Ought from Is. One way to do so, based on the possibility that a dynamic rule creates new ought-facts, was shown by Searle in the 1960s (Searle 1964, 2021; Hage 2011, 2018a, p. 97-102; Lucia and Fittipaldi 2021). A different way, which is the central topic of this article, is that an ought-fact can be grounded in other facts, based on a rule that is anchored in social reality. Let us assume that Alice ought to give the beggar money, because the beggar is poor and Alice is rich. The ought-fact supervenes on, is grounded in, two other facts, namely that Alice is rich and that the beggar is poor. This grounding relation is supported by a social rule that rich people should give money to poor people. (Yes, I am aware that this is overly simplistic.) This social rule is anchored, let us assume, in our social practice. The anchoring involves that sufficiently many people recognise that rich people ought to give money to poor people, and that they have the relevant meta-beliefs. Together, this establishes the ought-fact as a social fact. In schema18: anchoring facts (no ought) 18 (existence of a) mandatory rule grounding facts (existence of) (no ought) a duty (ought) The similarity to Toulmin’s (1958) lay-out of arguments is no coincidence, but discussing the relation to Toulmin’s work is beyond the scope of this article. However, the ought-fact is a constructivist fact, which means that if the fact ought not to be recognised, it does not exist. Unless this latter negative ought-fact can be grounded in the social practice, the initial social fact that Alice ought to give the beggar money stands. In the absence of reasons to the contrary, Alice ought to give the beggar money for the reason that Alice is rich and the beggar is poor. This shows by means of an example that it is possible to derive an Ought from an Is. 9.3 How to derive Is from Ought? Perhaps more interesting than the derivation of Ought from Is, is the derivation of Is from Ought. The conditions for the existence of constructivist facts include that a constructivist fact exists if it ought to exist, or – which boils down to the same thing – if its existence ought to be recognised. It is, for instance, the case that Alice ought to give the beggar money if the members of the relevant social group ought to recognise that this is the case. A legal example of the same phenomenon is that Pierre owns a particular car if the (relevant) legal subjects of Pierre’s legal system ought to recognise that Pierre owns this car. In general it holds that if a particular kind of fact is in a social group considered to be constructivist, it is possible to derive from the fact that some instance of this kind ought to exist that it actually exists. In the case of constructivist facts, it is possible to derive Is from Ought 9.4 Conclusion This article addresses the possibility to bridge the alleged gap between Is and Ought, and in particular the derivation of ought-judgments from only is-judgments. In a sense, the argument begged the questions by almost postulating that the sphere of Ought is a part of the sphere of Is, and by relaxing the demand of deduction to the demand of ‘mere’ derivation. This manoeuvre is not a fallacy, however, because the opposite views – that Is and Ought constitute different spheres and that deduction is the only reliable form of derivation – are at least as controversial as the postulations of this article. Moreover, the body of this article is devoted to making the view that Ought is a subcategory of Is plausible. It does so by introducing social facts as a category of facts that are mind-dependent, but at the same time not completely subjective, and by describing constructivist facts as a kind of social facts that are fundamentally open to questioning. Two characteristics of ought-facts, namely that they are mind-dependent and open to questioning, can not only be explained by assuming – wrongly – that the sphere of Ought differs from the sphere of Is, but also – and better – by assuming that ought-facts are constructivist. Having the notion of constructivist facts available also allows us to see how ought-facts are similar to legal facts, and to many value-facts which are also constructivist. References Bagnoli, Carla, ‘Constructivism in Metaethics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. 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