In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a ''reactionary'' view, according to which there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper's conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful.
This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory's main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting (and to my mind, attractive) consequences. The view offers a novel conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn't rely on the notion of a "determinative" or "explanatory" relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation.
Data-driven interatomic potentials have emerged as a powerful class of surrogate models for ab initio potential energy surfaces that are able to reliably predict macroscopic properties with experimental accuracy. In generating accurate and transferable potentials the most time-consuming and arguably most important task is generating the training set, which still requires significant expert user input. To accelerate this process, this work presents hyperactive learning (HAL), a framework for formulating an accelerated sampling algorithm specifically for the task of training database generation. The key idea is to start from a physically motivated sampler (e.g., molecular dynamics) and add a biasing term that drives the system towards high uncertainty and thus to unseen training configurations. Building on this framework, general protocols for building training databases for alloys and polymers leveraging the HAL framework will be presented. For alloys, ACE potentials for AlSi10 are created by fitting to a minimal HAL-generated database containing 88 configurations (32 atoms each) with fast evaluation times of <100 μs/atom/cpu-core. These potentials are demonstrated to predict the melting temperature with excellent accuracy. For polymers, a HAL database is built using ACE, able to determine the density of a long polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymer formed of 200 monomer units with experimental accuracy by only fitting to small isolated PEG polymers with sizes ranging from 2 to 32.
The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun 'I', so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. 1. Overpopulation puzzles and the metaphysics of persons I am a person: a conscious, rational, thinking being. I also have various parts: feet, hands, a nose, ears, and so on. Moreover, I have parts that are or involve my 'thinking parts': a brain, a head, and things without a conventional name in English, for example my 'nose-complement' (a part that includes all of me except for my nose). For the sake of vividness, focus on my nose-complement. My nose-complement has everything intrinsically required for personhood: it has a working brain with the capacity to sustain a complex mental life. Worse yet, it has my brain, which makes it an excellent candidate for thinking just what I think. But if my nose-complement thinks of itself what I think of myself, it is badly mistaken. It is plausibly not a person, and it certainly does not have a nose. Unfortunately, things seem to my nose-complement exactly the way they seem to me. What makes it the case, then, that in referring to myself I refer to a person and not to a nose-complement? And how can I know that I am a person and not a nose-complement? This is one of the many overpopulation puzzles widely discussed in the personal identity literature. However, my cursory presentation
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