Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction

Abstract

This essay is a plea for ideological toleration. Philosophers are right to be fussy about the words they use, especially in metaphysics where bad vocabulary has been a source of grief down through the ages. But they can sometimes be too fussy, dismissing as 'unintelligible' or 'obscure' certain forms of language that are perfectly meaningful by ordinary standards and which may be of some real use. So it is, I suggest, with certain idioms of metaphysical determination and dependence. We say that one class of facts depends upon or is grounded in another. We say that a thing possesses one property in virtue of possessing another, or that one proposition makes another true. These idioms are common, as we shall see, but they are not part of anyone's official vocabulary. The general tendency is to admit them for heuristic purposes, where the aim is to point the reader's nose in the direction of some philosophical thesis, but then to suppress them in favor of other, allegedly more hygienic formulations when the time comes to say exactly what we mean. The thought is apparently widespread that while these ubiquitous idioms are sometimes convenient, they are ultimately too 'unclear', or too 'confused', or perhaps simply too exotic to figure in our first-class philosophical vocabulary. Against this tendency, I suggest that with a minimum of regimentation these metaphysical notions may be rendered clear enough, and that much is to be

From Grounding to Supervenience?

“…It expresses what we may call a "necessitarian" view of grounding, and is endorsed by Correia (2005) and Rosen (2010), for example. Necessitarians can therefore accept a link between grounding and supervenience, in the form of S @ .…”

Laws and the Completeness of the Fundamental

“…Call an explanation of the sort guaranteed by this thesis a strongly fun-12 This formulation of the requirement is informed by Rosen's (2010) formulation of metaphysical naturalism. One might think we should instead adopt the stronger formulation that every maximal path beginning at the target must have a point beyond which every fact is fundamental.…”

“…Although in saying this we do describe reality, we do not describe fundamental reality. 4 Fundamental reality bears a special explanatory relationship to nonfundamental or derivative reality: the way derivative reality is may be 2 For discussion of metaphysical explanation and of the related notion of ground, see Fine (2001Fine ( , 2012, Schaffer (2009), Rosen (2010), and Wilson (2014). I should note that the term 'metaphysical explanation' is misleading on two counts.…”

Metaphysical Interdependence

“…Some (e.g. Schaffer, 2009;Rosen, 2010) prefer a formulation that makes use of a relational predicate (e.g. x grounds y) whilst others (e.g.…”

“…2 Grounding is usually taken to be transitive, irreflexive and asymmetric (e.g. Cameron, 2008;Rosen, 2010;Schaffer, 2010;Clark and Liggins 2012, 817). In this paper I develop a theory of metaphysical structure generated by dropping the asymmetry constraint on grounding.…”