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Irrealism about Grounding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2018

Naomi Thompson
Naomi Thompson*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton and Göteborgs Universitet
*
n.m.thompson@soton.ac.uk
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Abstract

Grounding talk has become increasingly familiar in contemporary philosophical discussion. Most discussants of grounding think that grounding talk is useful, intelligible, and accurately describes metaphysical reality. Call them realists about grounding. Some dissenters reject grounding talk on the grounds that it is unintelligible, or unmotivated. They would prefer to eliminate grounding talk from philosophy, so we can call them eliminitivists about grounding. This paper outlines a new position in the debate about grounding, defending the view that grounding talk is (or at least can be) intelligible and useful. Grounding talk does not, however, provide a literal and veridical description of mind-independent metaphysical reality. This (non-eliminative) irrealism about grounding treads a path between realism and eliminativism.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 82: Metaphysics , July 2018 , pp. 23 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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References

1 See Schaffer, , ‘On What Grounds What’ in Chalmers, D., Manley, D., & Wasserman, R., Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 347–383Google Scholar.

2 See e.g. Schaffer, ‘On What Grounds What’, 363–4; Rosen, ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’ in Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 109–136, 113Google Scholar.

3 For a defence of the former conception see e.g. Audi, , ‘A Clarification and Defense of the Notion of Ground’ in Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 101–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Audi, , ‘Grounding: Toward a Theory of the In-Virtue-Of Relation’, Journal of Philosophy 109 (2012), 685–711CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine, , ‘The Question of Realism’, Philosopher's Imprint 1:1 (2001), 1–30Google Scholar; Fine, ‘A Guide to Ground’, in Metaphysical Grounding, 37–80. In defence of the latter conception see e.g. Schaffer, , ‘On What Grounds What’ and ‘Monism: The Priority of the Whole’, Philosophical Review 119 (2009), 31–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See e.g. Fine, ‘The Question of Realism’; ‘A Guide to Ground’; Schaffer, ‘On What Grounds What’; Sider, , Writing the Book of the World (Oxford: OUP, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trogdon, ‘An Introduction to Grounding’ in Varieties of Dependence (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2012), 97–122Google Scholar.

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7 For that, see Clark, and Liggins, , ‘Recent Work on Grounding’, Analysis 72 (2012), 812–823CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Correia and Schnieder, Metaphysical Grounding; Trogdon, ‘An Introduction to Grounding’; Bliss and Trogdon, ‘Metaphysical Grounding’, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/grounding/ (2014); and Raven, , ‘Ground’ Philosophy Compass 10/5 (2015), 322–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 This is a rough and ready characterisation, but it will do for present purposes.

9 For the former strategy see Daly, ‘Scepticism about Grounding’, Metaphysical Grounding, 81–100 and Hofweber, ‘Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics’, Metametaphysics, 280–289; Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar, Chapter 13. For the latter see Wilson, , ‘No Work for a Theory of Grounding’, Inquiry 57 (2014), 1–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kosliki, , ‘The Coarse-Grainedness of Grounding’ in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2015), 306–344CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Explanation is generally considered to be transitive, asymmetric, irreflexive, non-monotonic and hyperintensional.

11 This is the strategy taken by Rosen in ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’, and by Trogdon in ‘An Introduction to Grounding’, amongst others.

12 See Audi, ‘A Clarification and Defence of the Notion of Ground’.

13 Rosen, ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’, 110.

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15 Hofweber, ‘Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics’, 267.

16 Wilson, ‘No Work for a Theory of Grounding’, 549.

17 Koslicki, ‘The Coarse-Grainedness of Grounding’ makes a similar point.

18 Wilson, ‘No Work for a Theory of Grounding’, 554–7.

19 E.g. Dasgupta, S., ‘The Possibility of Physicalism’, The Journal of Philosophy 111/9 (2014), 557–592CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine, ‘A Guide to Ground’; Raven, M., ‘In Defence of Ground’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90/4 (2012), 687–701CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosen ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’.

20 Fine, ‘A Guide to Ground’.

21 Raven, ‘Ground’, 326.

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24 See e.g. Trogdon, K., ‘Grounding: Necessary or Contingent?’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2013), 465–485CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 I assume here that irrealists about grounding will maintain that it is at least sometimes appropriate to make a claim about grounding (I think they might also take such claims sometimes to be true). I defend this claim in sections 3 and 4.

26 Wallace, D., ‘Decoherence and Ontology: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love FAPP’ in Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69Google Scholar.

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28 Kim, ‘Explanatory Knowledge and Metaphysical Dependence’, 54.

29 Fine, ‘A Guide to Ground’, 39.

30 For those who think causation is a primitive relation, the cases are much more similar. Knowledge of primitive causal relations would be hard to come by.

31 Rosen, ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’, 110.

32 Ibid., 134.

33 Of course, not all sentences about grounding are false according to the error theorist. Sentences like ‘there are no grounding relations’, ‘A doesn't ground B’ and ‘B is ungrounded’ might all be true (because they don't commit us to the existence of grounding relations). As is standard, I describe the error theorist's commitment as being to the systematic falsity of grounding sentences in order to circumvent this complication.

34 This terminology is borrowed from Kalderon, , Moral Fictionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapter 3.

35 Lewis, D., ‘Truth in fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), 37–46Google Scholar.

36 Cf. Kalderon, Moral Fictionalism, 121–123.

37 Walton, K., Mimesis and Make-Believe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

38 Kalderon, Moral Fictionalism, 124.

39 This view is developed in detail in my ‘Getting the Story Straight: Fictionalism about Grounding’ (in progress).

40 See my ‘Getting the Story Straight: Fictionalism about Grounding’ for more details.

41 This is arguably the position of Field in Science Without Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, where he defends the view that there are compelling instrumentalist justifications for continuing to engage in mathematical discourse, but declines to say what, if anything, mathematical utterances might be used to assert.

42 Field, Science Without Numbers.

43 See Wilson, ‘No Work for a Theory of Grounding’, 557.

44 Ibid.

45 Fine, ‘The Question of Realism’.

46 See Fine, ‘The Question of Realism’ for the details of the proposal.

47 Fine, ‘A Guide to Ground’, 39.

48 Fine, ‘The Question of Realism’, 16.

49 Price, H., ‘Expressivism for Two Voices’ in Knowles, J. and Rydenfelt, H. (eds) Pragmatism, Science, and Naturalism (Peter Lang, 2011)Google Scholar.

50 Gibbard, A., Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

51 Thanks to Darragh Byrne, Uriah Kriegal, David Liggins, Alastair Wilson and audiences in Nottingham, Hamburg, Birmingham, Southampton, and Barcelona for discussion and helpful comments.