Abstract Booklet Truth and Grounds - eidos

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Abstract Booklet Truth and Grounds 8 key note speakers: Organized by: eidos – the Centre for Metaphysics Kevin Mulligan Damiano Costa Fabrice Correia Paolo Crivelli Kit Fine Paul Horwich Stephan Kraemer Gonzalo Rodriguez-‐Pereyra Benjamin Schnieder Alexander Skiles With the support of: Swiss National Science Foundation Congressi Stefano Franscini University of Geneva University of Neuchâtel Humboldt Foundation – Anneliese Maier Award Mlle. Marie Gretler Stiftung Institute for Philosophical Studies, Lugano and 25 contributed talks http://eidos.philosophie.ch [email protected] Mlle. Marie
Gretler Stiftung
1 PROGRAMME Sunday, May 24 Arrival of the participants; registration AUDITORIUM 17:30 -‐ 19:00 Fabrice Correia: New Thoughts on factual Equivalence and Grounding 19:00 -‐ 20:30 dinner Monday, May 25 AUDITORIUM 08:30 -‐ 08:45 Welcome address 08:45 -‐ 10:15 Paolo Crivelli: Truth and Excluded Middle in Metaphysics Γ 7 10:15 -‐ 10:45 coffee break AUDITORIUM 10:45 -‐ 11:30 Alexander Bown: Two Notions of Truth in Epicurean Philosophy 11:45 -‐ 12:30 Brian Embry: How Not to Be a Truthmaker Maximalist ERANOS Giuliano Torrengo: Fragmentalist Presentism, Grounding , and Tensed Truths Alessandro Giordani: On Truth and Aboutness 12:00 -‐ 13:30 lunch AUDITORIUM 13:30 -‐ 14:15 Pauline van Wierst: Grounding in Bolzano’s Purely Analytic Proof 14:30 -‐ 15:15 Damiano Costa: Endurantism and the grounds of temporal existence 15:30 -‐ 16:15 Philipp Blum: Horizontal Grounding ERANOS Grounding Michael Clark: A Puzzle about Partial Lorenzo Casini: Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality Ciro de Florio: Grounding Arithmetical Truth 2 16:15 -‐ 16:45 coffee break AUDITORIUM 16:45 -‐ 18:15 Alexander Skiles: Existence, Intrinsicality, and Fundamentality 19:00 – 20:30 dinner Tuesday, May 26: Humboldt Day 10:00 -‐ 10:30 coffee break AUDITORIUM 08:30 -‐ 10:00 Kit Fine: Ground-‐theoretic Content AUDITORIUM 10:30 -‐ 12:00 Paul Horwich: Is TRUTH a Normative Concept? 12:00 -‐ 14:00 lunch AUDITORIUM 14:00 -‐ 14:45 Catharine Diehl: Fineness of Grain and Grounding: A Lewisian Account? 15:00 -‐ 15:45 Robert Michels: An Argument Against the Claim that Grounding is Minimal 15:45 -‐ 16:15 coffee break ERANOS Akiko Frischhut: Metaphysical Coherentism Andy Yu: Logic For Alethic Pluralists ERANOS Pablo Carnino: Against the Superinternality of Grounding AUDITORIUM 16:15 -‐ 17:00 Olla Solomyak: Grounding and Fundamentality: The Perspectives Approach 17:15 -‐ 18:45 Discussion 19:00 -‐ 20:30 dinner 3 Wednesday, May 27 AUDITORIUM 09:00 -‐ 10:30 Gonzalo Rodriguez-‐Pereyra: Grounding is not a Strict Order 10:30 -‐ 11:00 coffee break AUDITORIUM 11:00 -‐ 11:45 Martin Lipman: Fundamentality and the Reality-‐Appearance Distinction 11:45 -‐ 12:30 Casper Storm Hansen: Conventional Truths and Absolute Facts 12:30 -‐ 14:00 lunch AUDITORIUM 14:00 -‐ 14:45 Ghislain Guigon: Truths qua grounds 14:45 -‐ 15:30 Olivier Massin: Grounds by Nature 15:30 -‐ 16:00 coffee break AUDITORIUM 16:00 -‐ 16:45 Naomi Thomson: Fictionalism about Grounding 16:45 -‐ 17:30 Nathan Wildman: For Contingent Necessity-‐Makers 19:00 -‐ 20:30 dinner Thursday, May 28 AUDITORIUM 09:00 -‐ 10:30 Stephan Kraemer: Raising Semantics for Ground 10:30 -‐ 11:00 coffee break AUDITORIUM 11:00 -‐ 11:45 Kelly Trogdon: Do Grounds Explain What They Ground? 4 11:45 -‐ 12:30 Lorenzo Rossi: Graph, Truth, and Conditionals 12:30 -‐ 14:30 lunch AUDITORIUM 14:30 -‐ 15:15 Michael Raven: Expressing the Truth, Describing the World AUDITORIUM 15:15 -‐ 16:45 Benjamin Schnieder: Grounding: Completeness, Sufficiency, and Beyond 16:45 -‐ 17:16 coffee break AUDITORIUM 17:15 -‐ 17:45 Cerimony for the CSF young scientist award 19:00 -‐ 20:30 dinner Friday, May 29 Departure of the participants 5 KEY NOTE SPEAKERS Fabrice Correia, “New Thoughts on factual Equivalence and Grounding” Sunday, May 24, 17:30 – 19:00, Auditorium The logic of grounding and factual equivalence put forward in my “Grounding and Truth-‐
Functions” (Logique & Analyse, 2010) is defective in an important respect. The problem lies in the view, endorsed in the paper, that the logic of factual equivalence is R. B. Angell’s logic of “analytic equivalence”. I will argue in favour of an alternative view, and then propose an account of grounding in terms of factual equivalence. The notion of grounding that is the focus of “Grounding and Truth-‐Functions” is worldly, in contrast with the conceptual or representational notion people like Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen (and myself in other works) have in mind. I will end up with a very simple suggestion about how representational grounding can be understood in terms of truth and worldly grounding. Paolo Crivelli, “Truth and Excluded Middle in Metaphysics Γ 7” Monday, May 25, 08:45 – 10:15, Auditorium A large part of book Γ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is dedicated to the defence of two logical principles: one is often called ‘the Principle of Non-‐Contradiction’ (henceforth ‘PNC’), the other is normally referred to as ‘the Principle of Excluded Middle’ (henceforth ‘PEM’). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Metaphysics Γ are dedicated to PNC whereas chapter 7 focuses on PEM (chapter 8, the last of the book, puts forward considerations that bear on both principles). Aristotle offers several arguments in defence of PEM. The purpose of this study is to understand and assess this defence. Specifically, section i argues that at least one version of PEM is an ‘ontological’ principle, i.e. a claim about what reality is like. Section ii addresses the first and most important of Aristotle’s arguments in support of PEM, an argument based on Aristotle's famous definition of truth and falsehood. It examines and assesses earlier attempts to understand this argument and offers a novel reconstruction of it. Alex Skiles, “Existence, Intrinsicality, and Fundamentality” Monday, May 25, 16:45 – 18:15, Auditorium According to quantificationalists, what it is to exist can be characterized in terms of quantificational notions-‐-‐whether these be first-‐order and objectual (Quinean quantificationalism) or higher-‐order and non-‐objectual (Finean quantificationalism). In this talk, I argue against quantificationalism of both varieties by appealing to considerations of intrinsicality and fundamentality, both of which are intimately related with notions of grounding. Specifically, I argue that Quinean quantificationalism conflicts with the 6 fact that it's possible to intrinsically exist, and that both Quinean and Finean quantificationalism both conflict with the fact that it's possible to fundamentally exist. Kit Fine, “Ground-‐theoretic Content” Tuesday, May 26, 08:30 – 10:00, Auditorium I will consider various ways in which the notion of ground might be employed in developing a theory of content. Paul Horwich, “Is TRUTH a Normative Concept?” Tuesday, May 26, 10:30 – 12:00, Auditorium My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: (i) distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being intrinsically normative; (ii) sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; (iii) responding to the anti-‐deflationist, Dummettian argument (extended in different directions by Crispin Wright, Huw Price, and Michael Lynch) in favor of the conclusion that TRUTH is intrinsically normative; (iv) proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion -‐-‐ one that’s consistent with my deflationism about TRUTH, but that depends on the further assumption that MEANING is intrinsically normative; and (v) arguing that this further assumption is mistaken. Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra, “Grounding is not a Strict Order” Wednesday, May 27, 09:00 – 10:30, Auditorium In this paper I argue that grounding is neither transitive, nor irreflexive, nor asymmetric. Part of my argument consists in arguing that that truth making is neither transitive, nor irreflexive, nor asymmetric. Stephan Krämer, “Raising Semantics for Ground”
Thursday, May 28, 09:00 – 10:30, Auditorium In recent years, considerable progress has been made on the project of developing a plausible logic for ground. However, for the most popular candidates for such a logic, there is as yet no satisfactory semantics available. The most promising proposal, Kit Fine's truthmaker semantics, proves not to allow sufficiently fine-‐grained semantic distinctions. I present a kind of extension of Fine's semantics, which overcomes this difficulty. Its distinctive component is an operation of content-‐/raising/, through which the semantics can represent the idea that different facts can belong to different levels of reality. I briefly sketch some applications, implications, and possible variations of the semantics. 7 Benjamin Schnieder, “Grounding: Completeness, Sufficiency, and Beyond” Thursday, May 28, 15:15 – 16:45, Auditorium The distinction between partial and complete grounds plays a central role in all available theories of grounding. But is it all that clear? Not quite, or so I will argue in this talk. After examining some differences in how the distinction is treated, I will make a proposal about how it is best understood. 8 SELECTED SPEAKERS Alex Bown, “Two Notions of Truth in Epicurean Philosophy” Monday, May 25, 10:45 – 11:30, Auditorium There is only one surviving report of Epicurus' views on truth and falsehood in their own right. At the beginning of the second book of his Against the Logicians, Sextus Empiricus attributes the following account to Epicurus: 'True is that which is as it is said to be, and false is that which is not as it is said to be'. Curiously, this characterisation appears to ascribe truth and falsehood to things in the world about which one speaks, rather than to what is said about them. Commentators have either ignored this account or treated it as obviously incorrect. In this presentation, I will put forward an interpretation of the characterisation according to which it makes good sense and fits well with its context. I will argue that these notions of truth and falsehood apply to items of a special type, namely items composed of attributes and individuals which exist precisely when the individual in question has the attribute in question, which I call 'predicative complexes'. For example, seated Theaetetus, a predicative complex, exists precisely when Theaetetus is seated. I will show that it follows from the characterisation of truth and falsehood that a predicative complex is true precisely when it exists, and that this result explains certain remarks attributed to the Epicureans in which 'true' and 'existent' are treated as more or less interchangeable. But these are not the only notions of truth and falsehood employed by the Epicureans; they also have notions that apply instead to perceptions and judgements about things in the world, according to which a perception or judgement that some individual has some attribute is true (or false) just if the individual in question has (or fails to have) the attribute in question. I will argue that the Epicureans are not confused, despite what appearances might suggest: to the contrary, they have two clearly-‐characterised pairs of notions that apply to items of different kinds in similar situations. For example, when Theaetetus is seated, it is both the case that seated Theaetetus is true (according to the first notion of truth), and the case that the judgement that Theaetetus is seated is true (according to the second notion of truth). I will end by suggesting that the Epicureans may have considered the first notion of truth to be more basic than the second, so that if a perception or judgement is true (in the second sense), it is so because the corresponding predicative complex is true (in the first sense), and not vice versa. In support of this suggestion, I will examine a fragmentary text in which an Epicurean seems explicitly to explain the truth of perceptions in terms of the truth of predicative complexes. In this way, predicative complexes, when true (in the first sense), might in some sense be said to make the corresponding perceptions and judgements true (in the second sense). 9 Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo, “Fragmentalist Presentism, Grounding , and Tensed Truths” Monday, May 25, 10:45 – 11:30, Eranos Our aim is to reconcile what we will call unrestricted correspondence theory of truth (UCTT – the thesis that the truth of past-‐tensed and future-‐tensed sentences supervenes, respectively, on past and future facts) with a presentist metaphysics. Assume that it is true now that in a few minutes Socrates will be standing: can the presentist claim that such a future-‐tensed truth is now grounded in a future fact? It depends on how we read ‘future fact’. A future fact in a weak sense is a future-‐ tensed fact that obtains at present. If Socrates will be standing in a few minutes, the fact that Socrates will be standing obtains at present. A future fact in a strong sense is a present-‐tensed fact that will obtain in the future. If Socrates will be standing in a few minutes, the fact that Socrates is standing will obtain in a few minutes. In light of presentism, future-‐tensed truths cannot be grounded in future facts in the strong sense (and analogously for past-‐tensed truths), for there are no such things. We argue that in the framework of a non-‐standard form of tense realism — Kit Fine's fragmentalist — presentism and UCTT are compatible. Fragmentalism is the view that reality is constituted by different “fragments” or maximally coherent collections of tensed facts, which constitute reality in a absolute sense, but which obtain only within each fragment. Hence, although reality “as a whole” is incoherent, no two incompatible facts obtain together in the same fragment. We call fragmentalist presentism the thesis that, within each fragment, only the present entities exist. Here is a sketch of our argument. Suppose that within a fragment we fnd both the present-‐tensed fact that there are no outposts on Mars and the future-‐tensed fact that there will be outposts on Mars, while in a different fragment we fnd the present-‐tensed fact that there are outposts on Mars. Within the frst fragment, only future facts “about” outposts on Mars in the weak sense obtain, so that there is no proper ground for the true claim that there will be outposts on Mars in the strong sense. Still, nothing prevents the fragmentalist presentist from claiming that reality contains the supervenience base for such a truth, since it is also constituted by the corresponding future facts in the strong sense that obtain in the second fragment. Brian Embry, “How Not to Be a Truthmaker Maximalist” Monday, May 25, 11:45 – 12:30, Auditorium Perhaps the most pressing problem facing contemporary truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths. What is the truthmaker for such truths as ‘Pegasus does not exist’? The problem is not merely that it is hard to see what could make negative truths true; the problem is that, intuitively, such truths do not need truthmakers. Intuitively, it is true that Pegasus does not exist simply because Pegasus does not exist, not because something else does exist. In light of such cases, it seems we should say that negative truths do not have truthmakers. But restriction of the truthmaker principle is widely rejected in the contemporary literature as ad hoc, the first step on a slippery slope to the rejection of truthmaker theory generally. If 10 negative truths do not have truthmakers, why should we think that any truths have truthmakers? What is called for is a principled reason to think that positive truths have truthmakers while negative truths do not. I argue that Francisco Peinado, a 17th-‐century scholastic philosopher, succeeds in giving a principled reason to restrict the truthmaker principle. It is a little known fact that 17th-‐century scholastics had the notion of a truthmaker [verificativum], and that they had extensive debates about truthmakers for negative truths, tensed truths, and necessary truths. While some 17th-‐century scholastics argued that we must posit irreducible negative entities as truthmakers for negative truths, Francisco Peinado was famous for arguing that negative truths do not have truthmakers. His restriction of the truthmaker principle is entailed by his distinctive theory of truth-‐bearers and what I call an “aboutness constraint” on truthmaking. Peinado thinks that truth-‐bearers are token mental acts, called ‘judgments’. Judgments that have intentional objects. For example, the judgment that Peter is running is about Peter’s running. In the 17th-‐century there was a debate about how to account for the distinction between affirmative and negative judgments. Some people thought that affirmation and negation form part of the intentional object of a judgment, so that contradictory judgments have different intentional objects. But like many contemporary philosophers, Peinado thought that we must draw a distinction between the force and content of a judgment. On his view, contradictory judgments ‘p’ and ‘¬p’ are about the same thing, but they are about that thing in a positive and negative way, respectively. Hence, ‘Peter is running’ is about Peter’s running in a positive way, and ‘Peter is not running’ is about Peter’s running in a negative way. Peinado also endorses an aboutness constraint on truthmaking, according to which any truth with a truthmaker is about its truthmaker. From Peinado’s force/content distinction and his aboutness constraint on truthmaking, it follows straightforwardly that, on pain of contradiction, positive and negative truths do not both have truthmakers. Since positive truths intuitively do have truthmakers, we can conclude that negative truths do not. In addition to explaining Peinado’s view, I give some support both to his theory of judgment and to the aboutness constraint on truthmaking. I conclude that Peinado provides a principled reason to restrict the truthmaker principle to positive truths. Alessandro Giordani, “On Truth and Aboutness” Monday, May 25, 11:45 – 12:30, Auditorium One of the central ideas underlying the introduction of truthmakers is that truth is grounded: a true proposition is something that owes its truth to something else, so that the truth of the proposition is not a primitive fact. This first intuition links truth and grounding by requiring that the truth of any true proposition (or of any true proposition in a certain fundamental class), is grounded. On the other hand, according to some scholars (especially Lowe), a truthmaker of a proposition is something such that it is part of the essence of that proposition that it is true if that thing exists. This second intuition links truth and grounding by requiring that the relation that any true proposition bears to an appropriate truthmaker is grounded in the essence of the proposition itself. Interestingly enough, different kinds of grounding are involved in the previous intuitions. To be sure, we can summarize them by stating that, for any true proposition , it is in virtue of the essence of (essential grounding) that is true in virtue of the existence of t (existential grounding), where t is a truthmaker of . 11 The aim of the present paper is to analyse this twofold relation between truth and grounding by exploiting the (scarcely explored but sufficiently acknowledged) fact that every proposition is about something. The idea is that it is part of the essence of both that is about something and that it is in virtue of something related with what is about that is true. Hence, in the simplest case where is about t precisely when represents t as actual, we conclude that it is in virtue of the fact that represents t as actual that is true in virtue of t. The paper is subdivided into three parts. The starting point of the analysis is constituted by Lewis’ theory of aboutness, which is developed both from a logical and from a philosophical point of view. Hence, in the first part, an appropriate characterization of Lewis’ conception is proposed and the intensional theory advanced by Lewis is supported with a hyper-‐intensional theory capturing the epistemic side of the notion of aboutness. Then, in the second part, an intensional theory of the relation between aboutness and truth-‐grounding is offered and it is show how to provide an intuitive clarification of the two relation of essential and existential grounding specified above. Finally, in the third part, a hyper-‐intensional variant of the intentional theory is specified, which fit better with our intuitive judgements concerning the relation of aboutness. In addition, some indications concerning the metaphysical structure of the subject matter a proposition is about are advanced. Pauline van Wierst, “Grounding in Bolzano’s Purely Analytic Proof” Monday, May 25, 13:30 – 14:15, Auditorium In A Purely Analytic Proof (Rein analytischer Beweis, 1817), the Czech philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano presents a new proof of what we nowadays call the Intermediate Value Theorem (IVT). Distinguished mathematicians such as Gauss and Lagrange had already given proofs of this theorem that made it perfectly clear that it is true, but Bolzano felt the need to provide a proof that shows why the IVT is true. In other words, in Bolzano’s view the IVT was in need of a grounding proof. It is commonly agreed that the proof that Bolzano presents in A Purely Analytic Proof is remarkably good for its time (e.g. Rusnock, 2000). This is remarkable, all the more because it is also commonly agreed that there are serious problems with Bolzano’s theory of grounding (Betti, 2010b; Roski, 2014; Rusnock, 2000; Tatzel, 2002). As Bolzano admits himself, he is unable to do much more than to give some characteristics and examples of truths that in his view stand in the grounding relation, and it is unclear how this alleged theory could work in mathematical practice (Bolzano, 1837). Where it indeed, as Bolzano argues himself in the preface to A Purely Analytic Proof, his beliefs about grounding that enabled him to give such a good proof? And what does this proof tell us about Bolzano’s notion of grounding? These will be the main questions that will be addressed in this talk. Since Bolzano does not explain why in his view the proof that he gives in A Purely Analytic Proof is a grounding proof, and barely why those of other mathematicians are not, we will start out this talk by identifying exactly which aspects make that Bolzano’s proof is, according to his conception, a grounding proof. For example, we will consider to which extent Bolzano’s proof relates truths in their objective order, that is, in the order in which truths “really” stand, 12 as opposed to how we come to know them. Further, we will consider how we can understand Bolzano’s claim that proofs of this theorem that appeal to geometric concepts are circular. On this basis we will gain better understanding of the value of Bolzano’s conception of grounding for mathematical practice. Michael Clark, “A Puzzle about Partial Grounding” Monday, May 25, 13:30 – 14:15, Eranos This paper discusses a puzzle involving the notion of partial grounding. In outline, the puzzle is this. According to the standard analysis of partial grounding, facts of partial grounding are existential generalisations of a certain sort. In particular, where α and β are facts, the fact that α is partially grounded by β is identified with the fact that there is some collection of facts that includes β and fully grounds α. But, given plausible and widely held logical assumptions, this renders facts of partial grounding unfit for explanatory roles they plausibly have. So we must either deny that facts of partial grounding have the proposed explanatory roles, deny the logical assumptions, or deny the standard analysis of partial grounding. Insofar as we have reason not to deny any of these things, we have a puzzle. The most contentious part of this reasoning is the claim about partial grounding’s explanatory roles. The main aim of the paper is to explain and motivate the following claim: (Claim): For some facts α and β, β’s partially grounding α helps explain why some collection of facts that includes β fully grounds α. It is easy to show that (Claim) conflicts with the standard analysis of partial grounding plus the logical assumptions. But why believe it? The core idea is that some facts of grounding are more fundamental than others. To see the plausibility of this, suppose that α is grounded by β and that β is grounded by γ. It follows, given that grounding is transitive, that α is grounded by γ. But crucially, it is plausible that the fact that α is grounded by γ obtains in virtue of the grounding ‘links’ that stand between α and γ – i.e., the grounding relations between α and β and β and γ. In this way, the transitivity principle seems to generate derivative grounding facts. I argue that similar considerations motivate (Claim). Thus I conclude that there is a problem with partial grounding: a very natural analysis of the concept, combined with very natural logical principles, implies the falsity of very reasonable-‐looking grounding claims. Damiano Costa, “Endurantism and the Grounds of Temporal Existence” Monday, May 25, 14:30 – 15:15, Auditorium I argue for a new version of endurantism according to which objects exist at times in virtue of participating in events that are located at those times. David Lewis once wrote that endurance corresponds to the way in which a universal is wholly present wherever it is exemplified (Lewis 1986, 202). Call this claim Correspondence. Platonists about universals hold that universals are in space in virtue of their exemplifiers: universal F is present at region r in virtue of the fact that an object that instantiates F is located at r. Call this claim Platonism. I take inspiration from Platonism and Correpondence to 13 develop a new version of endurantism according to which objects exist at different times in virtue of something else being located at those times. What can this ‘something else’ be? One sensible option, following our best temporal semantics, is events. Thus, according to this new version of endurantism, objects exist at different times in virtue of participanting in events that are located at those times. Lorenzo Casini, “Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality” Monday, May 25, 14:30 – 15:15, Eranos Glennan (1996, 2002)’s mechanistic account of causality is based on the in-‐ tuition that mechanisms are the truth-‐makers of causal claims and provide the causal explanation of phenomena. A causal explanation is provided by opening the black box between cause and effect, that is, by pointing to the thread of intermediate events that link cause and effect; a truth-‐maker is found by identifying the system’s constituent entities, activities and organisation which together make the causal claim true by producing such a thread of intermediate events. The account is meant to be applicable to the higher-‐level systems studied by special sciences such as biology, psychology, sociology, etc. Against Glennan, Psillos (2004) and Craver (2007) have objected that the account is vulnerable to, respectively, an ontological and an explanatory regress, due to the asymmetric relation between mechanisms and counterfactuals. Re-‐ cently, Glennan (2011) has tried to block both regresses, by appealing to inter-‐ ventions and causal graph theory (Pearl, 2000; Woodward, 2002, 2003). In the talk, I will primarily focus on Psillos’ charge of ontological regress and Glennan’s reply to it, namely that mechanisms and counterfactuals are on a par. Psillos observes that Glennan’s analysis of mechanism gives rise to an onto-‐ logical regress, which would show that between mechanisms and counterfactuals there is an ontological asymmetry, such that counterfactuals are more basic than mechanisms. Whether X causes Y depends on the existence of a mechanism be-‐ tween X and Y. The mechanism is constituted by a number of parts, their inter-‐ actions and organization. The parts’ properties are related by counterfactual relations, which are described by generalizations that are invariant under interven-‐ tion, a` la Woodward. Whether the counterfactuals are true is—epistemically— revealed by interventions but is—ontologically—grounded and explained by fur-‐ ther, lower-‐
level mechanisms. Each mechanism can be further decomposed in the above manner. Ultimately, however, one runs out of mechanisms. For sys-‐ tems at the bottom of the mechanistic hierarchy, the truth of the counterfactual relations between the properties of their parts is ‘brute’, that is, not mechani-‐ cally grounded or explicable. Whence the asymmetry between mechanisms and counterfactuals—that is, between mechanisms and the non-‐mechanical facts that make true bottom-‐level counterfactual statements. In response to Psillos, Glennan argues that the use of interventions in the mechanistic account does not reduce the mechanistic account to Woodward’s manipulability account. One cannot do away with mechanisms. Counterfactuals and mechanisms are on a par in addressing the grounding issue. At higher levels, they need each other. At the bottom level, neither one works. Hence, counterfactuals aren’t more basic than mechanisms—are they? 14 I will argue that Glennan’s manoeuvre fails. Glennan uses interventions to characterize interactions as well as entire mechanisms by giving the truth condi-‐ tions of certain counterfactuals. As it happens, interventions do not help pick out truth-‐makers, and thus do not help Glennan address Psillos’ asymmetry charge, which is about truth-‐making. Bad news for Glennan. Not so for the manipu-‐ lationist, whose concern was rather the conceptual analysis of causality. If one assumes, as Glennan does, that the interventionist’s semantics of the counterfac-‐ tuals is adequate, which is key to Glennan’s own argument for the explanatory autonomy of mechanisms, it follows that Glennan’s argument for the ontological symmetry of mechanisms and interventions fails. I conclude by discussing the broader implications of this result for the metaphysics of causality and its possible connections to ground. Philipp Blum, “Horizontal Grounding” Monday, May 25, 15:30 – 16:15, Auditorium It has been noticed in recent debates that the notions of grounding, ontological explanation and determination may be useful not just in explaining how the world is layered into more and less fundamental levels, but that they may also be used to account for determination ties between equally fundamental entities. Drawing on older (and unjustifiably neglected) discussions, particularly of the primary / secondary quality distinction in modern philosophy and of the status of so-‐called 'accidential unities' in Aristotle, my talk aims to make some further progress in this direction, arguing -‐ that, on the horizontal dimension, we should replace Fine's “factual”/”non-‐factual” dichotomy with a continuum of degrees of objectivity; -‐ that degrees of objectivity are to be understood in terms of perspectivality: the more perspectival a phenomenon is, the less objective is its status; -‐ that perspectival facts are, on that account alone, not less real or less fundamental; -‐ that perspectivality rather is a matter of having extrinsic essences; -‐ that not all extrinsic and essential properties are relational: those that are not determine 'lesser entities'; -‐ that we need such lesser entities to account for the ontology of the proper sensibles, the mind, the social world, including things such as genders, races and (other) fictional objects. The prospects of such a theory of horizontal grounding in part depend, however, on a number of claims about its vertical cousin, which I will defend on independent grounds: -‐ The comparative relation “more fundamental than” is prior to the absolute property of fundamentality tout court. -‐ At least in some cases, vertical grounding is contingent. -‐ Vertical grounding is not hyperintensional (ie. “factual”, not “conceptual”). -‐ Grounding is a relation between things (particulars, properties), not between facts. -‐ Not every constituent of fundamental facts is fundamental (not even if it has “primary employment”). 15 Ciro de Florio, “Grounding Arithmetical Truth” Monday, May 25, 15:30 – 16:15, Auditorium Mathematical truths have been always considered as the archetype of nec-‐ essary truths. But what does ground their necessary truth? The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, we want to show that the grounds of arithmetical truths should take into account the deductive structure of mathematical thought; sec-‐ ondly, on the basis of the previous result, we will argue that the grounds of arithmetical truths are grounds for kinds of arithmetical truths. Morevoer, ac-‐ cording to us, the analysis of the grounding relation can shed some light on much debated problems of ontology of mathematics. Let us start from a really easy arithmetical proposition `2 + 2 = 4' and let us ask, then, what does ground its truth? Let us take into account three possible answers. The first answer, which is the most direct and immediate, is the following: the existence of the standard model of natural numbers grounds the truth of the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4: E!N ◃ T(`2 + 2 = 4') The fundamental problem with this kind of answer is that it is not partic-‐ ularly informative. As a matter of fact, the existence of the standard model grounds the truth of an infinite class of arithmetical propositions (viz., every true standard arithmetical proposition) whose meaning is deeply different. In other terms, this strategy looks like to state that the truth of the proposition ︎Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo in 1815︎ is grounded by the complex event which comprehends the whole history of the universe from the Big Bang to yesterday (Sha︎er indeed upholds something similar). A natural reply to this problem is provided by the second answer: it is not necessary to assume the whole standard model but it is sufficient just one part, that is, a certain segment of it. The problem is to understand which one. At first stake, one could say: the smallest segment which makes true the proposition `2 + 2 = 4' (see the cognate notion of minimal truthmaker, Armstrong 2004: 19-‐23). However, even in this case, we have to face some troubles. Firstly, let pn be an arithmetical proposition which is made true by a sub-‐model (say, M) of the standard model, with at least n elements. We have that for every proposition pk, with k < n, M grounds the truth of pk. Moreover, the truth of all the arithmetical propositions which are committed to an infinite number of elements is grounded in the whole standard model and this brings back to the first class of objections we taken into account. Thirdly, let us assume that a certain finite segment M grounds the true of the proposition `2 + 2 = 4'. It follows that M grounds the truth of infinite other propositions which have nothing to do with our addition: that is, truths regarding other objects and relations which, at least from an intuitvie point of view, are not involved in `2 + 2 = 4'. In other words, the problem still remains: we are not able to discriminate in a suitable way the different grounds of different arithmetical truths. The third answer tries to overcome the problems of the second one by fo-‐ cusing on a crucial feature of the structure of mathematical truths: they are essentially relational truths. 2 + 2 = 4 is necessarily true because it is a logical consequence of a certain set of axioms. To look for the ground of the arithmetical truth p let us procede in the following way: let us take the smallest subtheory in which p is provable (if we assume Peano Arithmetic (P A) as base theory, we pick out a certain subtheory S(PA)). Then we can say that the ground of the truth of p is the part S of the standard model which grounds the truth of axioms of S(PA). An example: `2 + 2 = 16 4' is provable from the axioms ∀x(x + 0 = x) e ∀x∀y(x + s(y) = s(x + y)) by suitable substitutions. The gound of the truth of `2 + 2 = 4' is therefore that fragment of standard model (say S) which makes true the axioms of addition. It allows to avoid part of that generality which affects the previous answers. S grounds the truth of every proposition which depends on (that is, it is provable from) the axioms of addition. This could be a good argument for the thesis according to which all the infinite additions actually are the same structural arithmetical fact depending on a particular section of the standard model. 17 Catharine Diehl, “Fineness of Grain and Grounding: A Lewisian Account?” Tuesday, May 26, 14:00 – 14:45, Auditorium Theories of non-‐causal, metaphysical relations of grounding and ontological dependence raise a new challenge to the sufficiency of David Lewis’s account of propositions for providing adequate fineness of grain. In On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), Lewis argues that modal realism yields a satisfying theory of propositions: propositions are sets of worlds, or, equivalently, functions from worlds to truth values. This provides a mathematically and philosophically tractable theory. Coarse-‐grained propositions do not satisfy all the theoretical roles of propositions. In particular, the contents of belief and other intentional attitudes are more fine-‐grained than modal differences. Such attitudes are hyperintensional: we might doubt, believe, or hope that p is the case, while having no such attitude towards q, even though p and q are intensionally equivalent. Lewis provides several sug-‐ gestions for individuating content more finely so as to account for such differences. Lewis’s strategy, along with similar approaches pursued by Max Cresswell (1975) and John Bigelow (1978), consists in building features of the way content is rep-‐ resented into the content itself. These approaches thus allow attitude ascriptions to be sensitive not just to worldly but also to representational differences. Grounding, however, poses a new challenge to a merely intensional account, because grounding statements purport to capture dependence relations among worldly entities. Grounding claims are intended to express worldly, non-‐causal, explanatory dependence relationships between the grounding and the grounded facts. If grounding is a relation among among worldly entities, however, then these entities will have to possess a finer-‐than-‐modal structure. The fineness of grain is essential to the theoretical advantages grounding offers in capturing the particular nature of many philosophical claims. Any account of propositions of suitable grain for handling grounding claims must satisfy two desiderata: first, it must supply sufficient fineness of grain to make distinctions that are not captured by differences in possible worlds. Second, it must offer some sort of story about how these differences could be in the world. In this paper, I’ll argue that Lewis’s account is more malleable than one might think and that a Lewisian-‐inspired approach is capable of satisfying the first desideratum. To show this, I propose a modification of Bigelow’s framework for belief contexts to account for the grounding operator. This shows that a Lewisian-‐inspired appraoch can satisfy the technical requirements of gorunding. To evaluate whether a Lewisian approach can fulfill the second desiderata, we have to distinguish two senses of worldliness. I will say that a view is weakly worldly iff mental or representational items don’t affect the truth-‐value of its claims. By contrast, it is strongly worldly iff no components of its content are representational or mental. The approach I suggest satisfies weak but not strong worldliness, but I’ll argue that’s the only one that matters. My approach offers an attractive, theoretically tractable way of handling the fineness of grain of grounding that fairs well when compared to rival theories of structured propositions. 18 Akiko Frischhut, “Metaphysical Coherentism” Tuesday, May 26, 14:00 – 14:45, Eranos An almost consensual idea in Western philosophical tradition is that every chain of ontological dependency, where one thing exists because of another thing, needs to terminate in some fundamental level, which itself does not depend on anything else. Until very recently, views that reject this ‘metaphysical foundationalism’ and imply either infinite or circular chains of ontological dependency have been widely shunned. Noticeably little to no argument has been offered for this; proponents of metaphysical foundationalism seem to think that it is evidently and almost trivially true that there cannot be ‘turtles all the way down’ or that circular scenarios as for example envisaged in some time travel cases by David Lewis are in some metaphysical sense impossible. Very recently, a few philosophers have challenged this orthodoxy. Although infinite chains of ontological dependency constitute infinite regresses, they have argued that the type of regress is not necessarily vicious. They have shown that our reluctance to accept such infinitism is largely based on philosophical prejudice rather than sound argument. Surprisingly little attention, however, has yet been given to other non-‐
foundationalist views which could be summarized under the label ‘metaphysical coherentism’, and which feature circular or holistic dependency structures. The aim of my talk will be to examine and evaluate metaphysical coherentism as a non-‐
standard meta-‐ontological view. I shall first attempt to determine what makes a structure finite but non-‐well founded. This will involve a closer look at the logical properties that such a structure must have in order to be counted as ontologically coherentist. A basic distinction that can be drawn here is that between circular coherentism, featuring circular dependency chains, and holistic coherentism, featuring a network of interdependent entities and symmetrical dependency relations. Are ontological structures like this possible at all? If so, are both equally feasible? Given the scarce amount of literature on the topic, a good place to start might be to look at similar views in other areas of philosophy and see whether the debates and arguments engaged there can be used in the metaphysical debate as well. An obvious choice is epistemic coherentism. I will also have a look at philosophical structuralism and the idea that relations are ontological prior to their relata. One thought that emerges is that our evaluation of coherentist structures is closely related to what we expect from a metaphysical explanation and in what way these expectations differ from the expectations we have from epistemic explanations. One idea we find in the literature, and that I will look into, is the distinction between epistemic and metaphysical explanatory failure. Epistemic explanations are meant to justify the conclusion of the argument. If they fail to do so, they fail full stop. This seems to be the problem with circular explanations. But the metaphysical analogy is not immediately obvious. What do we expect from a metaphysical explanation in the first place, and when exactly has it failed? Whether we should accept coherentist structures in ontology might on the one hand depend on technical details such as whether or not the relation of ontological dependency can be symmetrical. This, in turn, depends on whether it can be thought of as distinct from the relation of grounding or not. On the other hand it might depend on what we are willing to accept as primitives in our theories. Metaphysical coherentism certainly asks more from us in this regard as theories employing standard well-‐founded ontological structures do. If we 19 accept coherentism, we need to accept entire structures as primitive and on the whole inexplicable. Whether we are willing to do so depends on what we ask from a metaphysical explanation. And this, in turn, might be better decided on a case by case basis rather than in general. Or so I will argue. Robert Michels, “An Argument Against the Claim that Grounding is Minimal” Tuesday, May 26, 15:00 – 15:45, Auditorium If a fact is grounded in a set of facts, does the relation of grounding also hold between the same fact and any larger set of facts? There is a consensus in the recent literature on grounding that this is not the case. It is usually assumed that the truth of grounding claims is not generally preserved under the addition of further grounds. For example, if the fact that this object is coloured is grounded in the fact that the object is red, the former fact need not also be grounded in the facts that the object is red and that two plus two equals four. In other words, grounding is usually assumed to be non-‐monotonic. (See for example Rosen (2010), Fine (2012)) This assumption is compatible with two different views of grounding, a view on which the truth of grounding claims is sometimes preserved and a view on which their truth is never preserved under addition of further grounds. In a recent paper, Audi has advocated the latter view, arguing that grounding obeys a principle he calls Minimality. (See Audi (2012).) Minimality says that if a fact [q] is grounded in a set of facts Γ, then there is no proper subset of Γ which also grounds [q]. In my talk, I will present an argument against the claim that grounding is Minimal in this sense. I will begin by discussing the philosophical significance of Minimality and the status of grounding as a component of Neo-‐Aristotelian metaphysics. My argument involves another component of Neo-‐Aristotelianism, namely a prim-‐ itive notion of essentiality, the notion of ‘truth in virtue of the nature of . . . ’. (See Fine (1994)) The argument’s main premise is a principle which establishes a link between this notion and the notion of grounding. The linking principle says that if the proposition ⟨p⟩ is true in virtue of the nature of x, then the fact that ⟨p⟩ is true is grounded in the fact that x exists. Given the linking principle, it can be shown that Audi’s claim that grounding is minimal conflicts with a standard assumption in the logic of essence as defined in Fine (1995), namely that ‘true in virtue of the nature of ...’ is monotonic. The conclu-‐ sion of my argument is hence that given the standard Neo-‐Aristotelian view of essentiality, minimality cannot be maintained. Andy Yu, “Logic For Alethic Pluralists” Tuesday, May 26, 15:00 – 15:45, Eranos By and large, truth theorists have been monists, in that they take there to be exactly one, generic truth property. Clearly, traditional inflationists—who take truth to be a thick, metaphysically-‐interesting property such as correspondence—are monists; inso-‐ far as truth-‐
maker theorists take truth to be a (single) thick, metaphysically-‐interesting property that is 20 explained in terms of a truth-‐maker, or ground, they too are inflation-‐ ists and thus monists. Nonetheless, traditional deflationists—who take truth to be a thin, metaphysically-‐
uninteresting property—are also monists. Traditional inflationists and deflationists alike are monists. However, contra monists, pluralists take there to be distinct, domain-‐specific truth properties. For example, correspondence truth is asso-‐ ciated with the scientific domain, coherence truth is associated with the mathematical domain, and superwarrant (an epistemically-‐constrained kind of) truth is associated with the ethical domain. However, it is well-‐known that pluralists face two closely-‐related challenges. The first challenge, due to Williamson (1994); Tappolet (2000), is to maintain a standard account of the logical operators—according to which a negation is true iff the negand is true, a conjunction is true iff both conjuncts are true, and a disjunction is true iff either disjunct is true. The second challenge, due to Tappolet (1997), is to maintain a standard account of logical consequence—according to which the entailment relation necessarily preserves truth. The problem is that the standard accounts seem to presuppose that there is generic truth, and it is unclear to what extent pluralists can grant or appeal to such a thing; plausibly, though, pluralists can grant generic truth but hold that it is grounded in domain-‐specific truth. Unfortunately for pluralists, there have been few attempts to answer these challenges in a sufficiently systematic and precise way. Cotnoir (2013)’s attempt is a notable ex-‐ ception, but focuses only on answering the second challenge, and founders when taken to be an attempt to answer the first challenge. Specifically, for example, on simple and plausible assumptions, Cotnoir’s account incorrectly predicts that the negation of a mathematical claim has the correspondence truth property, and it incorrectly predicts that mixed conjunctions are not true in any way. In this paper, I present a (sentential) logic on behalf of pluralists that answers the challenges in a sufficiently systematic and precise way; it also meets three other con-‐ straints I impose. The resulting account of the logical operators is standard, and indeed in the spirit of the accounts informally suggested on behalf of pluralists but not formally developed by Edwards (2008, 2009); Lynch (2009, 2013); Wright (2013); the account is based on the idea that the domain-‐specific truth of complex claims is grounded in the domain-‐specific truth of their sub-‐
sentences. Similarly, the resulting many-‐valued account of logical consequence is standard, and indeed suggested on behalf of pluralists but not formally developed by Beall (2000); Wright (2013); see also Pedersen (2006). I close the paper by addressing two salient issues. The first issue concerns the significance of the apparent constructibility of generic truth, while the second issue concerns possi-‐ ble links with ontological pluralism and logical pluralism, if the framework is extended to a first-‐order logic or multivalent logic, respectively. Olla Solomyak, “Grounding and Fundamentality: The Perspectives Approach” Tuesday, May 26, 16:15 – 17:00, Auditorium On the now-‐familiar hierarchical conception of reality, a distinction is drawn between the ground-‐level, or fundamental facts and the higher-‐level, non-‐fundamental facts that are said to be grounded in the fundamental. The grounding picture is one on which the higher-‐level 21 facts obtain in virtue of the fundamental facts, and their obtaining is, in an important sense, nothing over and above the obtaining of the fundamental facts that ground them. A puzzle arises in thinking about the structure of reality on this conception, or more precisely, about the relationship and distinction between the fundamental and the non-‐ fundamental facts. On the one hand, there is a sense in which reality seems to be exhausted by the fundamental facts — since the higher-‐level facts are nothing over and above the fundamental facts that ground them, it seems that the fundamental facts are ultimately all there is to reality. On the other hand, there is an important sense in which non-‐fundamental facts do obtain in addition to the fundamental, and stand in genuine grounding relations to one another. So there is an important sense in which the fundamental facts do not constitute all the facts; there are non-‐fundamental facts as well. The puzzle arises in the attempt to reconcile these two considerations, and explain how it is that the non-‐fundamental facts obtain in addition to the fundamental, despite being nothing ‘over and above’ the fundamental. I’ll argue that these two aspects of the grounding picture are more difficult to reconcile than it may appear: A picture that simply takes the non-‐
fundamental facts to obtain in addition to the fundamental facts fails to grant the ground-‐level of reality the kind of metaphysical distinction we typically take it to have, while a picture that takes reality to ultimately be exhausted by the fundamental does not do justice to the non-‐
fundamental aspects of reality. After presenting the puzzle for the grounding picture, I’ll argue that we can reconcile the two opposing considerations by appeal to the notion of a perspective. We’ll see that implicit in the grounding picture are two distinct perspectives on reality, each of which I think is essential to making sense of the metaphysics of ground: the ground-‐level perspective, from which reality is exhausted by the fundamental facts, and the broader, hierarchical perspective, from which reality has a hierarchical structure. On the approach I’ll present, each of these perspectives corresponds to a distinct way of being the case, or sense in which a fact can obtain. I’ll thus argue that making sense of the grounding picture requires that we adopt a kind of pluralism about what it is for something to be the case, and in particular, that fundamental and non-‐fundamental facts must obtain in fundamentally different ways. I’ll explain what such a pluralism would amount to, and how it can help us make sense of the notion of ground as well as its relation to the surrounding notions of fact-‐hood, obtaining, and fundamentality. Pablo Carnino, “Against the Superinternality of Grounding” Tuesday, May 26, 16:15 – 17:00, Auditorium Much theorizing about grounding has been going on lately, the notion is most frequently presented as a distinctive explanatory relation between facts or propositions. Metaphysicians say, for instance: the fact that Sam is in such and such mental state grounds the fact that Sam is sad; or: facts about individuals in New York ground the fact that New York is a city. A notorious problem with the ideology of grounding, or at least some versions thereof, concerns the question of what, if anything, grounds the grounding facts. In other words, once we take on board the idea that facts about Sam’s brain state ground the fact that Sam is sad, a question arises as to what grounds the more complex fact that Sam’s brain state grounds the fact that 22 Sam is sad. Such a question is particularly pressing for those who wish to draw an ontology of the fundamental from the ungrounded facts. Indeed, if one thinks that the ungrounded facts involve only fundamental entities, facts involving Sam and especially facts involving New York had better not be ungrounded. Otherwise one is pushed to the rather unpleasant conclusion that Sam, New York, and virtually any other entity is a fundamental entity. Another reason that could drive one to find grounds for the grounding facts is their arrangement in patterns. One would naturally say that if the fact that Sam is Sad is grounded in facts about Sam’s brain state, then facts about other people’s being Sad are also grounded in facts about the corresponding people’s brain states. Similarly, if one thinks that the fact that New York is a city is grounded in facts about the people of New York, then one will also take facts about other cities’ cityhood to be grounded in facts about the corresponding people. In short: patterns of grounding claims seem to emerge in a way that calls for explanation. Be it as it may, some philosophers have tried to answer the challenge of grounding the grounding facts in various ways. Karen Bennett for instance, advocated that the grounding relation is superinternal, i.e. whenever A grounds B, A grounds the fact that A grounds B. Louis de Rosset supports the same proposal in the form of a principle he calls ‘Because’. The purpose of this paper is to provide an argument against this proposal. The argument draws on two important formal features of grounding: transitivity and a special version of the thesis called grounding necessitarianism. The two features in question seem to be accepted by Bennett and by a vast majority of grounding theorists. As I will argue, these features together with the superinternality of grounding (or the seemingly identical ‘Because’ principle) have unpalatable implications regarding the metaphysics of modality. In particular, they commit us to the grounding of many modal truths in common ordinary contingent facts. After explicating why this is too big a bullet to swallow I will conclude that grounding is not superinternal. 23 Martin Lipman, “Fundamentality and the Reality-‐Appearance Distinction” Wednesday, May 27, 11:00 – 11:45, Auditorium The distinction between reality and appearance has been with metaphysics from its beginnings (think Parmenides, Democritus, Plato). One may think that it’s this older distinction that is currently re-‐entering metaphysics as the distinction between the fundamental and non-‐fundamental, or the ungrounded and grounded (see Fine 2007: 23). It is a distinctive feature of the way in which the distinction is currently regimented that the apparent is aligned with what is the case, and the real is aligned with something over and above what is the case (see, e.g. Fine 2001, and Fine 2005). Relatedly, it’s widely assumed that grounding is factive: if φ because ψ, then ψ and φ (see e.g. Fine (2012), Schaffer (2009), Correia (2014) and Bliss and Trogdon (2014)). This talk raises two general worries for the factivity of the apparent/non-‐fundamental, and explores a non-‐factive understanding of the non-‐fundamental instead. First worry. What is apparent is often a perspectival matter: from different points of view different facts appear to obtain. Now many believe that, for example, colours are not part of reality precisely because of well-‐known cases of conflicting appearances. A colour chip may be red to one observer, and not red but orange to another, without there being any good reason to privilege one observer. If some facts ground the fact that the rose is red, and some facts ground the fact that the chip is not red (but orange), and grounding is factive, then the rose is red and not red, which is incoherent. So a factive notion of the apparent/non-‐fundamental does not allow us to handle conflicting appearances, even though much of our manifest image seems to ascribe properties that admit of such variance across equally good perspectives (see Williams 1978). To the extent that the non-‐fundamental genuinely obtains and grounding is factive, these are not notions that allow us to make sense of the manifest image in virtue of reality. Second worry. Antirealist views are typically motivated by the perceived need to relieve us from certain explanatory questions. The nominalist, for example, typically wants to avoid the reality of numbers because, if they were real, we would face the question of how we make epistemic contact with them, a question that they take to conflict with plausible views in epistemology (see e.g. Benacerraf 1973). But if the apparent/non-‐fundamental genuinely obtains, taking the existence to be merely apparent does not undermine any explanatory questions regarding them – instead, it only creates the further burden of adequately grounding the mathematical facts in the real facts. This suggests that the apparent/non-‐
fundamental does not fit the antirealist aims of relieving us from the need to offer certain explanations. In light of these rough worries, I want to explore a slightly different set up: we align truth and the real/fundamental fact (in reality φ ↔ φ), and instead take the notion of apparent/non-‐
fundamental fact to be substantive (it is an apparent fact that φ ↛ φ). I will discuss possible implications of this for the notion of grounding, and whether or not this revision abandons the spirit of the current grounding-‐based approach to metaphysics. 24 Casper Storm Hansen, “Conventional Truths and Absolute Facts” Wednesday, May 27, 11:45 – 12:30, Auditorium I will offer a solution to the Liar paradox, and the other semantic paradoxes, based on David Lewis’ (1969) theory of language conventions. According to Lewis, for a sentence to be true is that the actual world is among those possible worlds for which it has been conventionally (and im-‐ plicitly) agreed that it is appropriate to utter the sentence in question – appropriate in an idealized sense where we disregard matters of relevance, the possibility that the agent has false beliefs, the possibility that in the given situation it is morally obligatory to lie, etc. That account of truth leaves no room for a sentence being true if and only if it isn’t. So the Liar cannot be such a sentence. So what is it? It is, however, consistent with Lewis’ theory that there are strings of words that seem to be a precise indicative sentence but for which we in fact have no precise convention, i.e. no agreement among the members of a language community that for any possible world determines whether the sentence is appropriately assertible in that world. That is the status of the Liar. There is no paradox. I give an account of what it is that can make a sentence defective in this way while at the same time appear to have clear truth conditions. Here I draw on Nagel (1986) and his ideas about human beings’ attempt at taking a “view from nowhere”. Truth conditions, as we normally understand and use them, come with a certain presupposition. The presupposition is that the facts that are relevant to the satisfaction (or lack thereof) of the truth conditions are given independently of the adoption of the convention of using those truth conditions and of the resulting truth values of the sentences in question. This presupposition is correct in most cases: the fact of the greenness of grass is unaffected by our linguistic conventions and the truth value they result in for the sentence “Grass is green”. But for the Liar the presupposition fails. Having a convention for that kind of truth conditions – I call them “view-‐ from-‐nowhere truth conditions” – in place is sufficient for a sentence to seem to be in good standing, but not sufficient for it to actually be so. We don’t have a convention for the appropriateness of asserting a sentence for which the presupposition fails. We would need to adopt one to give the “paradoxical” sentences clear truth conditions – truth conditions simpliciter as opposed to view-‐from-‐nowhere truth conditions. I argue that we are free to create such a convention. We could, if we wanted to, establish a Tarskian (1944), a Kripkean (1975), a revision (Gupta 1982), or a dialetheist (Priest 2006) convention. The central desideratum to be taken into account when making such a decision is to facilitate easy com-‐ munication. Ghislain Guigon, “Truths qua grounds” Wednesday, May 27, 14:00 – 14:45, Auditorium Grounding discourse is mainly used by Aristotelian realists about grounding, namely these philosophers who take grounding sentences at their face value and argue for the theoretical utility of this discourse thus understood. Outside Aristotelian circles, the grounding language game is sometimes, reluctantly, played by a small group of sceptics who argue that grounding 25 discourse is obscure or unintelligible, that the language can easily be abused so as to give rise to pseudo problems and empty theorising. The conclusion of grounding naysayers is usually normative: they are advising us against using grounding discourse. But grounding discourse itself is innocent. The culprit is the Aristotelian understanding of it. By understanding grounding sentences at their face value Aristotelians commit themselves to a realm of non-‐identical entities objectively linked by metaphysical connexions of determination. I confess to finding the Aristotelian metaphysical connections of determination miraculously fabulous. I confess to finding the utilitarian case for believing in them levels unconvincing. But looking at the recent history of analytic philosophy banning grounding discourse from philosophical theorising does not seem to be a promising way to resist Aristotelian grounding realists. The historical episode that I have in mind is Quine’s advice against using second-‐
order and modal logics because of their undesirable apparent commitments. It is fair to say that Quine’s advice has not been taken. I predict the same fate for the advice against using grounding discourse. But the history of debates about second-‐order and modal logics indicates a more promising way of resisting Aristotelians. By proposing to understand monadic second-‐order logic in terms of a plural logic George Boolos has shown us that the set-‐theoretic commitments of the second-‐order language game are not forced upon its players. By translating modal idioms into counterpart theory David Lewis has shown us that we can use modal idioms when theorising and yet avoid the Aristotelian essentialist commitments of quantified modal logic. Likewise, if we can understand grounding sentences adequately without taking them at their face value, then the Aristotelian commitments of the grounding language game are not forced upon its players. Such a strategy would consist in understand grounding sentences differently in such a way that the difference would not interfere when conversing with Aristotelians … until they start drawing metaphysical conclusions which follow from their false sentences but not from our homophonic true grounding sentences. In my presentation, I shall introduce such an alternative understanding of grounding discourse that allows us to talk like a grounding realist but in a half-‐hearted, flexible, and not so serious way. Olivier Massin, “Grounds by Nature” Wednesday, May 27, 14:45 – 15:30, Auditorium What, if anything, explains that A grounds B? Fine (2012) suggests that if a fact is grounded in some other facts, then it lies in the nature of the grounded fact that it should be grounded in the grounding facts: ’It is the fact to be grounded that “points” to its grounds and not the grounds that point to what they may ground’. The intuition behind this view –that grounding stems from the nature of grounded entities– is widespread. It is echoed in most examples considered in recent liter-‐ ature on grounding (conjunction grounded in plurality of conjuncts, determinables grounded in determinates, values grounded in natural properties...); it seems entailed by the view that the grounding entities constitutes the grounded ones (Fine, 2012) or by the view that grounding facts are disjunctive parts of the grounded ones (Correia & Skiles, ms); it is suggested by the view that grounding relations, contrary to causal relations, relate entities of different “levels” (Schaffer, 2012) and require a top-‐down approach, the 26 responsibility of the grounding relations between strata incurring to the upper facts; finally, this intuition is suggested by the view that ground and on-‐ tological dependence are close cognates: if ontological dependence has its sources in the nature of the dependee, then the same must be true in the case of grounding: it must arise from the nature of the grounded fact. I want to argue that this intuition, although true of some important cases of grounding, cannot be generalized to all. One way to challenge it is to argue that some grounding relations are not grounded in the essences of their relata (Rosen, 2010, Mulligan, ms). I shall press here another sort of counterexamples, which tends to be overlooked in most of the recent literature, to the effect that the grounding relation is sometimes grounded in the nature of the grounding fact. While some en-‐ tities are indeed essentially grounded; there are some other entities which essentially ground. Some things are grounds by nature. Putative examples are: resultant forces essentially ground accelerations; promises essentially grounds claims and obligation; ownership essentially ground property rights; declaration essentially grounds insti-‐ tutional facts. I shall argue that such relations of grounding, which are grounded in the nature of the grounding entities rather than in the nature of the grounded ones, cannot be dismiss as being non-‐metaphysical (it is wrong to see them as causal, normative or even institutional grounding if this entails that they are not cases of metaphysical grounding), and that they do not relate fact of different levels, but same-‐level facts. One upshot is that there is perhaps no single answer to the question of what grounds grounding facts: some grounded facts point to their grounds; some grounds points to the facts they ground; sometimes grounding might be brute. I shall finally suggest some examples where the grounding relation is grounded in the nature of entities wholly distinct from its relata. One pending issue is whether this plurality of grounds threatens the unity of grounding. Naomi Thomson, “Fictionalism about Grounding” Wednesday, May 27, 16:00 – 16:45, Auditorium Consider the way in which moral facts might be said to depend on natural facts, or the truth of a conjunction to depend on the truth of its conjuncts. This seemingly non-‐ causal, explanatory notion of dependence is called ‘grounding’. The aim of this paper is to develop and argue for a new approach to our understanding of grounding; fictionalism about grounding. Fictionalists about grounding hold that grounding claims are false as interpreted literally, but they can nevertheless be useful for expressing or conveying some non-‐literal content. I begin (in §1) by underlining some motivations for departing from the standard assumption of realism about grounding. I then outline two ways of formulating fictionalism about grounding. The first (§2) is in the style of Hartry Field’s fictionalism about mathematics. According to the Field-‐style fictionalist, sentences about grounding are strictly and literally false, but the usefulness of making grounding for the purposes of simplification and systemisation justifies our continued engagement in grounding talk. The second version of fictionalism about grounding (§3) offers a different justification for talking about grounding. Fictionalists of this stripe (which is in a style most prominently defended by Stephen Yablo) hold that sentences about grounding are representational aids apt for conveying content that does not have to do with grounding. I give an account of this 27 conveyed content in terms of a notion of explanation (though not that of the ‘metaphysical explanation’ that is often appealed to in order to elucidate grounding claims). In §4 I argue that the second, Yablo-‐style fictionalism about grounding is the best way to account for both philosophical and folk uses of grounding locutions. In §5 I explain how Yablo-‐
style fictionalists about grounding are able both to respond to many of the worries raised by grounding sceptics, and to retain many of the benefits claimed by realists about grounding. Finally (§6) I consider and respond to some specific objections to this form of fictionalism about grounding. Nathan Wildman, “For Contingent Necessity-‐Makers” Wednesday, May 27, 16:45 – 17:30, Auditorium The notion of a truth-‐maker – that is, a fact which fully grounds the truth of another, related fact – is well known and (relatively) widely accepted. However, the closely related notion of a necessity-‐maker – that is, a fact that fully grounds another, related fact’s necessity, rather than its truth – is radically under-‐explored. This paper aims to fill some lacunae concerning necessity-‐makers by addressing some puzzles that emerge from commitment to them. In particular, postulating necessity-‐makers naturally leads to questions about their modal status; specifically, if Q is a necessity-‐maker for some necessity P, what might Q’s own modal status be? One obvious option is that Q is itself a necessity. But what of the other side of the modal coin – could Q be a contingency? Put more generally, are contingent necessity-‐makers possible? Hale (2013) argues they are not. This is because, according to him, the only plausible source of contingent necessity-‐makers – linguistic conventionalism – is fundamentally incapable of providing grounds for absolute necessities. Hale then uses this argument to partially motivate accepting necessary necessity-‐makers, which he thinks offer an extremely fruitful ground for addressing questions about the source of necessity in general. Here, in the first part of the paper, I detail Hale’s argument against contingent necessity-‐makers. And while I agree with Hale that linguistic conventionalism isn’t a viable source of contingent necessity-‐makers, I disagree that it’s the only plausible source available. Consequently, I think his rejection of contingent necessity-‐makers is too quick. To that end, the second part of the paper goes on to show that not only are contingent necessity-‐makers possible, but in fact a multiplicity of them are actual, serving as full grounds for the necessity of many absolute necessities. In brief: I show that the fact [□(Socrates is wise v ¬(Socrates is wise))] is partially grounded in its true disjunct, [Socrates is wise]. Then, by the definition of partial grounds, it follows that there is some (possibly empty) Δ we can ‘add’ to [Socrates is wise] to get a full grounds Γ. But, because the contingency of [Socrates is wise] infects upwards, Γ must itself be contingent. Upshot: [□(Socrates is wise v ¬(Socrates is wise))] is fully grounded in a contingent plurality, ([Socrates is wise], Δ). Consequently, at least one absolute necessity’s necessity is fully grounded in a contingency. Further, this argument easily generalizes to cover any contingent Q which is at least a partial ground for some P’s necessity. The general result is that there are as many contingent necessity-‐makers as there are such Q’s. 28 Finally, after dismissing some potential objections, I conclude that there are contingent necessity-‐makers, and that believing in them offers metaphysicians a useful tool for addressing questions about the grounds of (certain portions of) modality. 29 Kelly Trogdon, “Do Grounds Explain What They Ground?” Thursday, May 28, 11:00 – 11:45, Auditorium Consider the following claims: (1) The existence of {Socrates} derives from the existence of Socrates. (2) The ball’s being red determines that the ball is colored. (3) There is a labor strike due to the fact that the truck drivers are refusing to work and are instead picketing outside their headquarters. (4) The water is boiling because H20 molecules that compose the water have overcome the forces of attraction between them. There is growing interest in the idea that claims like (1)–(4) are grounding claims – claims about what grounds what. Proponents of grounding typically introduce the notion in explicitly explanatory terms, though there is some disagreement regarding the precise sense in which grounding is supposed to be explanatory in nature. Some such as Dasgupta (2014), Fine (2001, 2012), and Litland (2013) claim that grounding is explanatory in the sense that grounding is a type of explanation – to say that one entity grounds another is just to say that the former explains the latter in a certain sense of ‘explains’. Others such as Audi (2012), Rodriguez-‐Pereyra (2005), and Schaffer (2012) claim that, while grounding isn’t a type of explanation, it’s explanatory in the sense that the relation of grounding backs or underwrites explanations. As grounding is typically introduced in explanatory terms, one way to be a skeptic about grounding is to argue that we don’t have any good reason to think that there is a distinctive relation answering to our talk of grounding that is explanatory in nature. Wilson (2014), for example, doesn’t see why we should think that there is such a relation that’s explanatory in either of the senses identified above. My sense is that many of those who are skeptical about grounding are so at least partly on the basis of the fact that they find claims to the effect that grounding is explanatory in nature either obscure or unmotivated. In response to the skeptic, in this paper I argue that grounding is indeed explanatory. Rather than arguing that grounding is a type of explanation, my aim is to defend the grounding-‐as-‐ backing-‐relation view. The overall idea is that there is a general condition for one proposition to be explanatorily relevant to another – a condition that doesn’t itself appeal to grounding – and there are grounds that satisfy this condition with respect to what they ground. (I remain neutral on whether every ground is explanatorily relevant to what it grounds. Compare: Strevens (2008) argues that only some causes satisfy a criterion of explanatory relevance by which they’re explanatorily relevant to what they cause.) This criterion for explanatory relevance concerns what I call non-‐causal programing, a notion modeled after Jackson and Pettit’s (1998, 1990, 1992) important notion of causal programing. I argue in particular that: (i) there are claims to the effect that one proposition grounds another illustrating the concept of grounding in which the first proposition, if true, non-‐causally programs for the second, and (ii) if one proposition non-‐causally programs for another then the former is explanatorily relevant to the latter. 30 Lorenzo Rossi, “Graph, Truth, and Conditionals” Thursday, May 28, 11:45 – 12:30, Auditorium Many philosophers and logicians are interested in the notion of truth and es-‐ pecially in what is considered the most naïve intuition about it, chiefly supported by the behavior of the word “true” in natural languages. Such naïve view can be (in first approximation) described as follows: the notion of truth for a language L is uniquely characterized by the fact that, for some notion of equivalence, every declarative sentence “φ” of L is equivalent to “‘φ’ is true”, where “‘φ’ is true” is also a sentence of L. I briefly introduce the theories of naïve truth developed by Kripke and Field and I discuss Field’s program, a research project aimed at preserving Kripke’s theory of truth and at adding to it a non-‐trivial conditional connective. This paper essentially addresses Field’s program via a semantics based on some graph-‐
theoretical intuitions and tools. The resulting model shows that Field’s program can be satisfied respecting some apparently natural criteria on the char-‐ acterization of the conditional, which arguably are not met by Field’s theories. At the same time, the model developed in the paper contributes to the semantics of naïve truth with some specific results, e.g.: (i) natural partial versions of every Łukasiewicz semantics are proven consistent and ω-‐
consistent with naïve truth (whereas it is known that non-‐partial versions of finitely valued Łukasiewicz semantics are inconsistent with naïve truth, and the continuum valued one is ω-‐ inconsistent with it); (ii) a unique operator for “determinateness” can be defined that applies unrestrictedly to every sentence receiving a truth-‐value, possibly including the determinateness operator itself, consistently with naïve truth. Such operator is very simple, yet more expressive than what can be obtained in partial theories based on logics weaker than Łukasiewicz ones. Moreover, such a strong operator is unavailable in Kripke’s setting and is inconsistent with Field’s theory. Finally, I show how the semantics proposed here allows us to make some nice and new distinctions between intuitively different kinds of semantic paradoxes that are usually conflated together, mostly for technical reasons. For example, it is possible to use the present model to do justice to the intuition that liar-‐like paradoxes, truth-‐teller-‐like paradoxes, and more kinds of paradoxical sentences (e.g. developed by Yablo or Restall) are quite different in nature, thanks to the very specific treatment that this semantics gives to these cases. Michael Raven, “Expressing the Truth, Describing the World” Thursday, May 28, 14:30 – 15:15, Auditorium Although many areas of inquiry share a general interest in what the world is like, metaphysics is often supposed to be distinctive for its special interest in what the world is fundamentally like. This paper aims to clarify an elusive dispute over how to conceive of giving a fundamental account of the world. In a recent symposium on Ted Sider’s influential Writing the Book of the World, Kit Fine contrasts two projects in the metaphysics of fundamentality. The expressive project concerns expressing the truth in the most fundamental terms, whereas the descriptive project concerns describing the world in the most fundamental terms. To illustrate the alleged difference by example: given that ‘Fido barks’ is true, ‘Fido barks’ describes the world as well as ‘Fido barks 31 or Tibbles meows’ even though the disjunctive statement ‘Fido barks or Tibbles meows’ expresses something (disjunction) that the non-‐disjunctive statement ‘Fido barks’ does not. Both Fine and Sider agree that the distinction is an important axis of dispute within the metaphysics of fundamentality. But Fine is a dualist in that he accepts a significant distinction between the two projects, whereas Sider is a monist in that he rejects any significant distinction between them. This paper aims to help clarify this elusive dispute by exploring how ground can be applied to the distinction between the expressive and descriptive projects. Ground is supposed to be a distinctively metaphysical kind of explanation. For example, the fact that there is political instability in the Middle East is grounded in (holds in virtue of, is determined by) facts about the activities and attitudes of various people. I will explore an account of what a statement describes about the world that relies on ground and discuss how it might help clarify the elusive distinction between the two projects. The paper proceeds as follows. First, I clarify monism and dualism. Dualism is supported by examples (like the aforementioned case of disjunction) in which what a claim expresses goes beyond—or overflows—what it describes. I elaborate on overflow and refine the examples accordingly. Then I discuss what I take to be Sider’s objection to them and explore a reply on behalf of dualists. The reply ultimately relies upon characterizing what a claim describes. I explore successively refined characterizations. I conclude by discussing how the results reinforce the initial examples supporting dualism. 32

Abstract Booklet Truth and Grounds - eidos

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