Abstract
Structuralism and factualism are two significant metaphysical views about the fundamental traits of the world. Structuralism characterizes these traits in terms of structures, which, in turn, are either taken as primitive or accounted for mathematically in ways that may not settle what they are metaphysically (French, The structure of the world: metaphysics and representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014). Factualism takes fundamental traits of the world to be facts, which, in turn, either have constituents (Cumpa, A materialist criterion of fundamentality. Am Philos Q 51:319–324, 2014; Factualism and the scientific image. Int J Philos Stud 26:669–678, 2018) or do not, in which case their ultimate nature is similarly left open. These are importantly different accounts of the fundamental, which despite some surface similarities, turn out to be incompatible with one another. Can the debate between them be settled? Is there a fact of the matter to achieve that? In this paper, I argue that it is unclear how to offer conclusive answers to these questions, and advance an alternative, deflationary way of making sense of the debate.