Factualism

Factualism is the idea that something is always already in place before reasoning begins: a brute fact, axiom, or primordial assumption that cannot itself be derived from reason because it is what makes reasoning possible in the first place.

Factualism subordinates reason to what reason itself presupposes. When you look out and see "blue," "tree," "marriage," or "justice," you are already relying on distinctions your tradition has taught you (really, commanded you) to recognize.

Tradition furnishes the names, concepts, and standards by which reality becomes intelligible. Metaphysics, our picture of reality's basic structure, is thus downstream of tradition.

As Kant showed, pure reason can produce compelling arguments both that the world has a beginning in time and that it has no beginning. Different traditions hand down different articulations of the real, different conceptual grammars through which the world becomes intelligible. We do not first arrive at abstract truths and then build a tradition; propositions depend on concepts, and concepts are received through tradition.