Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness

Kovacs, David

doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0818-9

Cited by 34 publications

(39 citation statements)

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“…And Justification is equally naturally paired with Involvement: if 'grounding-involving' explanation exists, then this seems like a very good reason to think grounding does too. Kovacs (2017) dubs what I call Justification 'the argument from explanatoriness' and considers it the master argument in favor of the existence of grounding. This paper investigates the role explanation supposedly plays, both in characterizing and in justifying grounding.…”

Section: Inheritance Involvement Informativeness and Justificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grounding and metaphysical explanation: it’s complicated

Maurin

2018

Philos Stud

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Grounding theorists insist that grounding and explanation are intimately related. This claim could be understood as saying either that grounding 'inherits' its properties from (metaphysical) explanation (and that, therefore, contemplating the nature of explanation informs us about the nature of grounding) or it could be interpreted as saying that grounding plays an important-possibly an indispensablerole in metaphysical explanation (and that, therefore, that there are these explanations justifies positing grounding). Or both. I argue that saying that grounding 'inherits' its properties from explanation can only be justified if grounding is explanatory by nature (if so-called 'unionism' is true), but that this view is untenable. We ought therefore to be 'separatists' and view grounding and explanation as distinct. As it turns out, though, once grounding has been in this sense distinguished from the explanation it backs, the view that the role grounding plays in explanation justifies its introduction ends up in serious trouble. I conclude that the role grounding plays in explanation (if any) does not justify attributing to grounding whatever nature we think it has, and it most likely does not give us any special reason to think grounding exists.

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Section: Inheritance Involvement Informativeness and Justificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grounding and metaphysical explanation: it’s complicated

Maurin

2018

Philos Stud

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“…For some attempts and discussions see, Bennett (2004), McLaughlin and Bennett (2014), Leuenberger (2009), Paul andSider (1992), Shagrir (1999) and Stalnaker (1996). 12 Kovacs (2016) argues that a pattern of both modal and set-theoretical facts is capable of giving rise to an explanation of metaphysical dependence. Kovacs's account can thus be read as a way of showing how necessitation (or supervenience) can be explanatory.…”

Section: Reductive Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: The Character of Physicalism

Elpidorou

2017

Topoi

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naturalism, and dualism are reconsidered. The special issue is neither the first nor the last word on the topic of the character physicalism. Nonetheless, it offers both an updated appraisal of our current understanding of physicalism and concrete proposals for how to move forward. Physicalism: Ontology and MetaphysicsAt the heart of physicalism lies an ontological (or if you prefer, ontic) thesis.1 To espouse physicalism is to make certain commitments about what types of things (objects, properties, events, states of affairs) exist in our world (Quine 1948; cf. Hellman and Thompson 1977, p. 310).2 IfNot many issues in philosophy can be said to match, let alone rival, physicalism's importance, persistent influence, and divisiveness. To a first approximation, physicalism holds that everything that exists in our world is physical. An acceptance of physicalism commits thus one to a monistic worldview. Despite how variegated existing entities or properties might appear to be, everything that exists in our world is, according to physicalism, the same: namely, physical. Indeed, it is widely thought that physicalism demands not only that the non-physical (the chemical, the biological, the economic, the social, the mental, etc.) metaphysically depends on the physical but also that the non-physical is nothing over and above the physical. But what type of metaphysical dependence vindicates physicalism?The aim of this editorial introduction is twofold. First, Sects. 1-8 offer a critical introduction to the metaphysical character of physicalism. In those sections, I present and evaluate different ways in which proponents of physicalism have made explicit the metaphysical dependence that is said to hold between the non-physical and the physical. Some of these accounts are found to be problematic; others are shown to be somewhat more promising. In the end, some important lessons are drawn and different options for physicalists are presented. Second, in Sect. 9, the six papers that comprise the special issue are introduced and summarized. Each contribution to the special is, in different ways, concerned with explicating the character of physicalism. New ways of formulating physicalism are assessed; old ways are defended; and the distinctions between physicalism, Both terms are acceptable and the choice between them is ultimately idiosyncratic. "Physicalism" has the benefit of rendering the metaphysical view under discussion both more general (the extension of "physical," I presume, is larger than that of "material") and closer to present-day physics. "Materialism" has the benefit of showing how the metaphysical view under discussion has a historical lineage and as such relates to the views of Hobbes, Lucretius, and Democritus. 2 It is often stated that physicalism is both a contingent thesis and one that has strong modal commitments (Lewis 1983;Jackson 1998; Stoljar 2015). Its contingency is manifested in the claim that physicalism is a thesis about our world and even if it is true, it did not have to be so. Furthermore, the ...

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“…As noted by a referee, for instance, causation appears irreflexive and transitive, but the analogue of EXISTENTIAL GROUNDING seems obviously implausible for it; instances do not plausibly cause their generalizations. Metaphysical causation and ontological dependence also seem to be irreflexive and transitive, but the exact relationship of these to logical grounding principles like EXISTENTIAL GROUNDING and to metaphysical explanation is itself not obvious [12]. Consider, in contrast, a relation of conceptual priority, like that plausibly obtaining between p and p is true.…”

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“…Krämer suggests two ways of doing so: one treats "predicative" in PREDICATIVE EXISTENTIAL GROUNDING as meaning "has no propositional quantifiers", the other postulates a hierarchy of propositions and, thereby, a hierarchy of propositional quantifiers. 12 Neither way is without obvious problems; more importantly, it is hard to see why impredicativity should be generally worrisome in a grounding context. Our problem case is one where the grounding fact involved quantifies over propositions including itself, but without some additional explanation of why this is problematic, I worry that restricting EXISTENTIAL GROUNDING is a mere palliative remedy.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This is not to deny that there are ways of seeing the grounding relation which would motivate trying to solve this puzzle by keeping IRREFLEXIVITY and, perhaps, imposing some requirement of predicativity. If, for example, you thought that grounds were always "more fundamental" than what they ground, or that reality came stratified in 12 See the attempt in [13:? 88] for discussion.…”

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Emptying a Paradox of Ground

Woods

2017

J Philos Logic

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Sometimes a fact can play a role in a grounding explanation, but the particular content of that fact make no difference to the explanation-any fact would do in its place. I call these facts vacuous grounds. I show that applying the distinction between-vacuous grounds allows us to give a principled solution to Kit Fine and Stephen Kramer's paradox of (reflexive) ground. This paradox shows that on minimal assumptions about grounding and minimal assumptions about logic, we can show that grounding is reflexive, contra the intuitive character of grounds. I argue that we should never have accepted that grounding is irreflexive in the first place; the intuitions that support the irreflexive intuition plausibly only require that grounding be non-vacuously irreflexive. Fine and Kramer's paradox relies, essentially, on a case of vacuous grounding and is thus no problem for this account. Keywords Grounding · Paradoxes of ground · IrreflexivityInterest in the putatively explanatory relation of metaphysical grounding and, in particular, its "logic" has recently been the focus of much attention. 1 Grounding has often been taken to be a strict partial order-i.e. to be an irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive relation. However, there have been important challenges to the claim that 1 See [24] for a recent survey, [7,26,27] for the kick-off of the contemporary research program, and [23,26] for a defense of the coherence of the notion and that it is an explanatory relation.

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Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness

Cited by 34 publications

References 66 publications

Grounding and metaphysical explanation: it’s complicated

Grounding and metaphysical explanation: it’s complicated

Introduction: The Character of Physicalism

Emptying a Paradox of Ground

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