Postscript to “Truth-makers, entailment and necessity”

Anti-reductionism holds that there are irreducibly relational facts; reductionism that while there may be relational facts, there are no irreducibly relational ones. Perhaps the appeal of anti-reductionism can be explained sociologically with enemies like F. H. Bradley you do not need friends but it seems hard to find metaphysical merit in it. This result will, of course, be of intrinsic interest to the truth-maker theorists, who still mostly, like Armstrong, hang on to anti-reductionism or, like Campbell, part with it only with difficulty. Finally, some light has been shed on the origins of analytic philosophy. Russell's argument against Bradley was mistaken. This tends to undercut the widespread view that Russell's rejection of Bradley's views about relations was the decisive break that issued in analytic philosophy as we know it. Rather we see that it is hard to distinguish the most coherent form that his theory of relational facts could take from the theory he ascribes to Bradley.