ABSTRACT
The belief that the world is a product of our conceptualizations, that facts are as much made as found, has an air of otherworldliness—and a forceful “But people don’t make stars” is often thought to be the simplest way to bring proponents of such metaphysical foolishness back to their senses. For isn’t it obvious that the stars in the firmament are not of our doing? There were stars long before sentient beings crawled about and longer still before the concept “star” was thought of or explicitly formulated. Indeed, there would have been stars, with all their properties, had there never been organisms with minds. The claim that we make our world is thus untenable. We do create concepts and theories, but not the facts they purport to describe. These are mind-independent, a matter of the world just being as it is.
