Questions and Answers: Metaphysical Explanation and the Structure of Reality

Thompson, Naomi

doi:10.1017/apa.2018.51

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…How-questions, in contrast, aren't usually singled out as paradig-12. Thompson (2019) develops an account of metaphysical explanations on which they are particularly closely linked to such questions (or rather questions of the related form 'What makes it the case that S?'). It is an important feature of her account that whether we have a metaphysical explanation for a given fact is not a wholly objective affair, but sensitive to the epistemic situation of a given subject.…”

Section: The Haecceities Objection As a Grounding Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

In Defence of Hybrid Contingentism

Skiba

2022

Philosophers' Imprint

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Hybrid contingentism combines first-order contingentism, the view that it is contingent what individuals there are, with higher-order necessitism, the view that it is non-contingent what properties and propositions there are (where these are conceived as entities in the range of appropriate higher-order quantifiers). This combination of views avoids the most delicate problems afflicting alternative contingentist positions while preserving the central contingentist claim that ordinary, concrete entities exist contingently. Despite these attractive features, hybrid contingentism is usually faced with rejection. The main reason for this is an objection that crucially involves haecceitistic properties, properties such as being identical to Plato or being identical to Aristotle. The objection alleges that by accepting the necessary existence of such haecceities, hybrid contingentists incur an explanatory commitment that they are unable to discharge, namely that of explaining how it is that certain haecceities ‘lock onto’ their target individuals even when those individuals are absent. To defend hybrid contingentism against this charge, I first clarify the haecceities objection in several respects and consider, in particular, what notion of explanation the objection is operating with. After arguing that it can be fruitfully understood as a challenge to provide metaphysical grounds for certain haecceity facts, I develop a contingentist response to the objection that draws on recent work on the connection between ground and essence.

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Section: The Haecceities Objection As a Grounding Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

In Defence of Hybrid Contingentism

Skiba

2022

Philosophers' Imprint

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“…Firstly, not all explanations need to be expressed in this way; for example, Hitchcock (2012, p. 12) suggests that causal explanations may be elicited by how-questions ("how did George die? "), while Thompson (2019) suggests that metaphysical explanations are elicited by "what-makes-it-the-case"-questions ("what makes it the case that killing is wrong?" or, more compactly, "what makes killing wrong?").…”

Section: About Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Identities Unexplainable? Towards a Non‐causal Contrastive Explanation of Identities

Azzano

Carrara

2020

Theoria

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Can an identity be the proper subject of an explanation? A popular stance, albeit not one often argued for, gives a negative answer to this question. Building from a contentious passage from Jaegwon Kim in this direction, we reconstruct an argument to the conclusion that identities, to the extent in which they are necessary, cannot be explained. The notion of contrastive explanation, characterized as difference-seeking, will be crucial for this argument; however, we will eventually find the argument to be unsatisfactory. On the contrary, the discussion provides enough resources to sketch a very simple framework for a non-causal contrastive explanation of identities. Many instances will be provided, with different varieties of explanans, ultimately suggesting that certain entailment or biconditional principles involving identities (first and foremost, so-called two-level identity criteria) may indeed be taken to have an inherent explanatory value.

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“…SeeThompson (2019). Limitations of space dictate that we do not pursue discussion of what is the best account of metaphysical explanation here.23 Whether our intuitions do in fact track dependence relations in this way is an open question, and answering it would require an account of the epistemology of each of those local dependence relations.…”

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confidence: 99%