Vehicles, Not Facts: First-Person Realism and List's Quadrilemma
Anthony Ness
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) August 12, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21903780 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the first horn of List's quadrilemma conflates two theses: first-person realism about facts, which the author denies, and first-person realism about vehicles, which the author affirms. Proposes that this dissolves the quadrilemma's engine, and that the residual objection demands a fixed point failing in every cognate formalism, with the bridge from formal escape to phenomenal having underivable, a consistency condition the author likens to Gödel's second theorem. |
Abstract
No theory of consciousness, List has argued, can jointly respect first-person realism, non-solipsism, non-fragmentation, and one world. I offer a fifth response: the first horn is two theses sharing a name. First-person realism about facts should be denied; Cappelen and Dever’s deflation of the de se, read ontologically, supplies the argument. First-person realism about vehicles — the having of content — should be affirmed: immunity to error through misidentification resists every descriptive reconstruction, since descriptions select and having does not. The quadrilemma’s engine dissolves: one world, one inventory, borne many times over. The residual objection — that a fact about vehicles is still a fact — demands a fixed point failing in every cognate formalism (Tarski, Grim, Kleene, Breuer, Lawvere); the theory’s one informal joint, the bridge from formal escape to phenomenal having, proves underivable, a consistency condition shaped like Gödel’s second theorem. Illusionism is the disagreement this predicts.