Abstract

This paper critiques the contemporary reliance on linguistic analysis in metaphysics, arguing that it leads to the representational fallacy – a tendency to derive ontological conclusions from linguistic properties rather than from reality. We trace the historical roots of this issue to the Kantian and linguistic turns, which shifted metaphysical focus from ontology to semantics, situating language at the center of the philosophical inquiry. We examine how this fallacy manifests in the debate between A-theorists and B-theorists of time. Both camps rely on Structural Linguistic Representationalism – the assumption that language directly mirrors reality –, presupposing a necessary correspondence between linguistic structures and ontological facts. We argue that this dependence is misguided, as language alone cannot adequately capture the fundamental nature of reality. In addressing this issue, we analyze two approaches within the B-theory of time: the truth-conditions approach and the truthmaker approach. We contend that the truth-conditions approach reiterates the representational fallacy by deriving ontological conclusions from linguistic structures. In contrast, the truthmaker approach presents a more promising framework by shifting focus from language to ontology, grounding metaphysical explanations in the structure of reality in itself. We conclude that the pursuit of an absolute linguistic model to reveal the ultimate nature of reality is unjustified and hinders metaphysical investigation. Instead, we advocate grounding ontological inquiries in reality, using language as a tool rather than a source of metaphysical truth.