Fundamentality from grounding trees

Correia, Fabrice

doi:10.1007/s11229-021-03054-2

Synthese

2021

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-021-03054-2

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Fundamentality from grounding trees

Fabrice Correia

Abstract: I provide and defend two natural accounts of (both relative and absolute) fundamentality for facts that do justice to the idea that the “degree of fundamentality” enjoyed by a fact is a matter of how far, from a ground-theoretic perspective, the fact is from the ungrounded facts.

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Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

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Fundamentality and minimalist grounding laws

Giannotti

2022

Philos Stud

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What grounds facts of ground? Some metaphysicians invoke fundamental grounding laws to answer this question. These are general principles that link grounded facts to their grounds. The main business of this paper is to advance the debate about the metaphysics of grounding laws by exploring the prospects of a plausible yet underexplored minimalist account, one which is structurally analogous to a familiar Humean conception of natural laws. In the positive part of this paper, I articulate such a novel view and argue for its merits. The minimalist account shuns essences and takes laws to be unmysterious elite regularities. Therefore, it is a promising alternative for theorists of ground who spurn the acceptance of essentialism about the grounding laws but think that these are needed in our theorizing. In the negative part, I argue that widely accepted principles of ground, coupled with the tenets of minimalism, jeopardize the fundamentality of the grounding laws. I discuss two immediately available and prima facie appealing strategies to evade this threat. However, I show that both have undesirable theoretical costs. I conclude by casting doubts on whether the benefits of a minimalist account of fundamental grounding laws outweigh such costs.

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Fundamentality and minimalist grounding laws

Giannotti

2022

Philos Stud

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A kind route from grounding to fundamentality

Correia

2021

Synthese

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Scientific explanation as a guide to ground

Kortabarria,

Giannotti

2024

Synthese

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Ground is all the rage in contemporary metaphysics. But what is its nature? Some metaphysicians defend what we could call, following Skiles and Trogdon (Philos Stud 178(12):4083-4098, 2021), the inheritance view: it is because constitutive forms of metaphysical explanation are such-and-such that we should believe that ground is so-and-so. However, many putative instances of inheritance are not primarily motivated by scientific considerations. This limitation is harmless if one thinks that ground and science are best kept apart. Contrary to this view, we believe that ground is a highly serviceable tool for investigating metaphysical areas of science. In this paper, we defend a naturalistic version of the inheritance view which takes constitutive scientific explanation as a better guide to ground. After illustrating the approach and its merits, we discuss some implications of the emerging scientific conception for the theory of ground at large.

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Fundamentality from grounding trees

Abstract: I provide and defend two natural accounts of (both relative and absolute) fundamentality for facts that do justice to the idea that the “degree of fundamentality” enjoyed by a fact is a matter of how far, from a ground-theoretic perspective, the fact is from the ungrounded facts.

Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

Fundamentality and minimalist grounding laws

Fundamentality and minimalist grounding laws

A kind route from grounding to fundamentality

Scientific explanation as a guide to ground

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