Grounding the Unreal

Abstract

The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a picture on which our scientific theories exhibit a layered structure of dependence and determination. Economics is dependent on and determined by psychology; psychology in its turn is, plausibly, dependent on and determined by biology; and so it goes. It is tempting to explain this layered structure of dependence and determination among our theories by appeal to a corresponding layered structure of dependence and determination among the entities putatively treated by those theories. In this paper, I argue that we can resist this temptation: we can explain the sense in which, e.g., the biological truths are dependent on and determined by chemical truths without appealing to properly biological or chemical entities. This opens the door to a view on which, though there are more truths than just the purely physical truths, there are no entities, states, or properties other than the purely physical entities, states, and properties. I argue that some familiar strategies to explicate the idea of a layered structure of theories by appeal to reduction, ground, and truthmaking encounter difficulties. I then show how these difficulties point the way to a more satisfactory treatment which appeals to something very close to the notion of ground. Finally, I show how this treatment provides a theoretical setting in which we might fruitfully frame debates about which entities there really are.

Better Semantics for the Pure Logic of Ground

“…My principal aim here is not to defend the sparse view, but to limn its features. See [deRosset, manuscript, §4.4] for an argument that this commitment to congeries of facts, congeries of congeries of facts, etc ., is one the sparse theorist should be happy to make.…”

“…More subtly, if we introduce truth‐functional operators as part of an impure logic of ground, then natural syntactic and semantic assumptions force difficult choices for proponents of the sparse view. See [deRosset, manuscript] for extended discussion of this second issue. Using the resources of the graph‐theoretic semantics sketched here to develop an impure logic of ground is attempted in work under developmment.…”

Grounding and defining identity

“…For Litland (immediate) ground is connected to explanatory inference in that $$pp$$ immediately grounds q iff there is an explanatory inference from premisses all and only $$pp$$ to conclusion q (cf. deRosset, 2013). One may take the connections to be rules of explanatory inference.…”

“…First, the Null Account avoids the consequence that every object is fundamental. Several authors—e.g., Fine (2010b), Raven (2016), Litland (2017), deRosset (2013), Sider (2012), and Shumener (2020a, 2020b)—have all accepted that an object is fundamental if the object figures in a fundamental fact. If identity facts are fundamental then every object is fundamental.…”

Mereological Models of Spacetime Emergence

“…Then, define relative fundamentality as:

Relative Fundamentality: x is relatively fundamental to y if and only if x is more fundamental than, or ontologically prior to, y .There is a large amount of discussion on this distinction—and on relative fundamentality in particular—in the literature, for example, see Fine (2001, 2012), Schaffer (2009), Rosen (2010), Wilson (2012, 2016), Zylstra (2014), Koslicki (2015), Bennett (2017, ch. 5, 6), deRosset (2017).

…”