Grounding is not Superinternal (original) (raw)
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Grounding entails supervenience
Synthese, 2021
Do grounding claims entail corresponding supervenience claims? The question matters, as a positive answer would help grounding theorists address worries that their hyperintensional primitive is obscure, and also increase the argumentative strategies that are available within ground-theoretic frameworks for metaphysical inquiry. Stephan Leuenberger (" From Grounding to Supervenience? " , 2014a) argues for a negative response, by specifying some candidate principles of entailment and then claiming that each of them is subject to counterexamples. In this paper, I critically assess those principles and the objections he raises against them, and advocate a novel entailment principle that overcomes all the problems suffered by those other principles. The principle I defend places a supervenience-based constraint on grounding claims, and secures a substantive connection between grounding and modality, weaker than necessitation.
A New Argument for the Groundedness of Grounding Facts
Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about “derivative entities”—e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences ‘the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete’ and ‘the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p’, where ‘p’ is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics—must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on a principle, Purity, which states that facts about derivative entities are non-fundamental. Purity is questionable. In this paper, I introduce a new argument—the argument from Settledness—for a similar conclusion but which does not rely on Purity. The conclusion of the new argument is that every “thick” grounding fact is grounded, where a grounding fact [F is grounded in G, H, …] is said to be thick when at least one of F, G, H, … is a fact—a condition that is automatically satisfied if grounding is factive. After introducing the argument, I compare it with the argument from Purity, and I assess its cogency relative to the relevant accounts of the connections between grounding and fundamentality that are available in the literature.
Grounding, contingency and transitivity
Grounding contingentism is the doctrine according to which grounds are not guaranteed to necessitate what they ground. In this paper I will argue that the most plausible version of contingentism (which I will label ‘serious contingentism’) is incompatible with the idea that the grounding relation is transitive, unless either ‘priority monism’ or ‘contrastivism’ are assumed.
A Kind Route from Grounding to Fundamentality
Synthese, 2021
I offer an account of fundamentality for facts in terms of metaphysical grounding. The account does justice to the idea that whether a fact is absolutely fundamental, and whether a fact is more fundamental than, or as fundamental as, another fact, are a matter of where in a grounding-induced hierarchy of kinds of facts these facts appear.
Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2019
I explore the logic of ground. I first develop a logic of weak ground. This logic strengthens the logic of weak ground presented by Fine in his ‘Guide to Ground.’ This logic, I argue, generates many plausible principles which Fine’s system leaves out. I then derive from this a logic of strict ground. I argue that there is a strong abductive case for adopting this logic. It’s elegant, parsimonious and explanatorily powerful. Yet, so I suggest, adopting it has important consequences. First, it means we should think of ground as a type of identity. Second, it means we should reject much of Fine’s logic of strict ground. I also show how the logic I develop connects to other systems in the literature. It is definitionally equivalent both to Angell’s logic of analytic containment and to Correia’s system G.
An Impure Logic of Representational Grounding
Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2017
Studies on the logic of grounding , i.e. of the notion of one truth or fact holding in virtue of others, are currently flourishing. These studies vary significantly in their objets. They are not all concerned with the same notion: while most focus on metaphysical grounding, others are about logical grounding, which may be seen as a subtype of the other, more familiar notion. They also do not all assume the same conception of grounding: some assume a worldly conception, and others a conceptual or representational conception. And finally, they do not all focus on the same kind of logical features of grounding: some are concerned with the pure logic of grounding, and others with its applied or impure logic. In this paper, I put forward an impure logic of metaphysical grounding, where grounding is understood in a representational way.
Emptying a Paradox of Ground (forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophical Logic)
Sometimes we can have a fact playing a role in a grounding explanation, but where the particular content of that fact makes 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 and non-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.
Truth-Grounding and Transitivity
Thought, 2013
It is argued that if we take grounding to be univocal, then there is a serious tension between truth-grounding and one commonly assumed structural principle for grounding, namely transitivity. The primary claim of the paper is that truth-grounding cannot be transitive. Accordingly, it is either the case that grounding is not transitive or that truth-grounding is not grounding, or both.
A Note on the Logic of Worldly Ground (with S. Roski)
In his 2010 paper ‘Grounding and Truth-Functions’, Fabrice Correia has developed the first and so far only proposal for a logic of ground based on a worldly conception of facts. In this paper, we show that the logic allows the derivation of implausible grounding claims. We then generalize these results and draw some conclusions concerning the structural features of ground and its associated notion of relevance which has so far not received the attention it deserves.
Synthese, 2018
I develop a reduction of grounding to essence. My approach is to think about the relation between grounding and essence on the model of a certain concept of existential dependence. I extend this concept of existential dependence in a couple of ways and argue that these extensions provide a reduction of grounding to essence if we use sorted variables that range over facts and take it that for a fact to obtain is for it to exist. I then use the account to resolve various issues surrounding the concept of grounding and its connection with essence; apply the account to paradigm cases and to the impure logic of grounding; and respond to objections.