In Defence of Ground

Raven, Michael J.

doi:10.1080/00048402.2011.616900

Cited by 180 publications

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“…22 In my view, the difference is that sometimes the content of a fact plays a crucial role in its occurrence as a ground and sometimes it does not. 23 In particular, sometimes the particular content of a ground is irrelevant to the explanatory work it does in its occurrence as a ground for the grounded fact. How might this occur?…”

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“…22 Given that Fine and Krämer's puzzles would plausibly arise even for this notion of grounding, if there is such a notion, then we need a story for it even if the solution for some other target notion of grounding is to bar impredicative instances of EXISTENTIAL GROUNDING. 23 An anonymous referee suggests that there is something funny with talking about the occurrence of a fact as a ground. Since I take facts to be true propositions, grounding to be a relation between propositions, and grounding claims to be propositions about grounding relations, I see nothing funny about this, but if it bothers the reader, take my use of 'occurrence' to be a vulgar way of indicating the occurrence of a sentence-like entity, denoting a true proposition, in a claim about grounding; a claim that, if true, corresponds to a real grounding relation.…”

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“…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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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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Emptying a Paradox of Ground

Woods

2017

J Philos Logic

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“…6 Second, I distinguish between, on the one hand, "grounding" or "ground," and, on the other hand, "Grounding" (Wilson 2014). The lowercase terms are meant to denote an asymmetric relationship of metaphysical (or ontological) dependence without specifying its exact nature (Raven 2015).7 "Grounding" with a capital "G" refers to the primitive account of metaphysical dependence proposed by Fine (2001Fine ( , 2012, Schaffer (2009), andRosen (2010) and then developed by many others (e.g., Audi 2012a, b;Correia 2010Correia , 2013Raven 2012; Trogdon 2013a, b). Consequently, to say that the non-physical is grounded in the physical is to commit oneself to the claim that the non-physical holds in virtue of the physical without however taking a position on whether this relationship should be understood in terms of, for example, realization, composition, or even Grounding.…”

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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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“…7). 6 These others include Fine (2001), Raven (2012), and Dasgupta (Forthcoming). 7 Fine (2001) argues that on some antirealist views-expressivism, for instancethere are facts that are part of neither fundamental nor derivative reality.…”

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Laws and the Completeness of the Fundamental

Glazier¹

2016

Reality Making

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In Defence of Ground

Cited by 180 publications

References 15 publications

Emptying a Paradox of Ground

Emptying a Paradox of Ground

Introduction: The Character of Physicalism

Laws and the Completeness of the Fundamental

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