Writing the Book of the World

Abstract

for extensive and challenging comments (which, I fear, I have not fully addressed). Thanks also to Oxford University Press and to Blackwell Publishing for permission to include bits of Sider (), Sider (), and Sider (a). I'd also like to thank Kit Fine, John Hawthorne, and Phillip Bricker. I've learned much from talking to Kit about fundamentality in the past few years, and from thinking through his writings on the subject. John read large portions of the manuscript and gave me many insightful comments, as well as pushing me, years ago, to go beyond the predicate. Phil directed my dissertation, which was on Lewisian naturalness. He taught me the power of this idea, how to apply it to the philosophy of space and time, and much, much more. My intellectual debt to Phil is massive. Finally, it should be obvious how much this book owes to David Lewis. His ideas on natural properties and relations have always seemed to me among his best: powerful, correct, revolutionary yet deeply intuitive.

Explanation and Explanationism in Science and Metaphysics

“…Some regard the argument for genuine modal realism in Lewis (1986) also critically hinging on unification in a similar spirit. Ditto Sider (2011).…”

Metaphysical Interdependence

“…The final argument for metaphysical interdependence I will discuss here concerns the ability of the defender of interdependence to respond to a question posed in Bennett (2011) (also addressed in Sider, 2011 anddeRosset, 2013) about whether grounding is itself grounded. For the foundationalist, this question becomes a dilemma about whether or not the grounding relation is fundamental.…”

Rosy with Sider? The Case of the Metaphysical Liar

“…Thus she is not trying to integrate her semantics with syntactic theory, for example. [12,113] There is much here with which one could take issue. Can the issue of sentential meaning, in any useful sense of the word 'meaning', really be separated from the semantic contributions of subsentential expressions and so from the syntactic background of compositionality?…”

“…Acknowledging the multiple pulls towards thinking that ordinary language is governed by a nonclassical logic, he nonetheless makes the case that, 4 He envisages this for normative discourse, and issuing in theorems of the form Normative sentence S of L, as uttered by speaker x, is expressively appropriate for x in L iff φ(x) . [12,113] 5 The thought being presumably that a theory of meaning can be given through an account of truthconditions. Note, however, that 'is true' here is a standard natural language truth predicate, no further account of which is offered [12,113] Familiar Dummettian worries might be raised here; these become more urgent when we see the difficult decisions about a theory of truth for L that are forced on the metaphysical semanticist as the present paper develops.…”