 The term “brute fact approach” is slightly ambiguous. It can be identified with the rejectionist view sketched along the lines of 3.1 above, where to say that relations’ job is to relate is to take that fact about relations as primitive or “brute”. However, the expression, as it is used here, is intended to refer to the view that takes complexes such as states of affairs or facts as unifiers of their own constituents. This view was defended by Olson (1987) and Armstrong (1989, 1997), and challenged by Vallicella (2000).