<i>Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality</i>

Abstract

Notions such as ground, metaphysical dependence, metaphysical explanation, structure, and fundamentality enjoy an enormous amount of attention in branches of the contemporary analytic tradition. We are quite often assured by proponents of these notions that they are not at all new and are, in fact, of illustrious, historical pedigree. Aristotle, for example, is often cited as the granddaddy of the idea that reality is structured by an ontological priority ordering, with all else depending upon primary, or basic, substances. Appeal to the history of these metaphysical notions, however, is, by no means, the only motivation we are provided with for taking their study seriously. Some philosophers like to claim that it was metaphysical dependence relations of just this kind that were the real target of theories framed in terms of the (arguably) troubled relation of supervenience, for example. Sometimes, though, we are simply told that interest in these notions can be justified on the grounds that many of us share certain intuitions about their nature and the reality they structure: there must be something fundamental, some things are more basic than others, and there are particularly tight noncausal explanatory connections between certain entities, among others. Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality offers eleven essays that tap into the blossoming interest in, and treatment of, issues that pertain to reality and its noncausal, metaphysical structure.Editors Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder open the collection with their opinionated introduction. Anyone interested in gaining some insight into what the notion of ground actually is, and what folks who care about it are up to, would do well to read these pages. The editors begin with a brief and selective tour through grounding in the historical literature—the Euthyphro Argument, the PSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason), and Bernard Bolzano. This discussion is followed by a consideration of issues with the formulation of grounding claims, whether grounding is primitive or analyzable, problems of granularity, and some brief remarks on the logic of ground. The introduction also offers a cursory exploration of connections between grounding and other philosophically significant notions such as modality, the “because” locution, explanation, existential dependence, truth making, and reduction.The opening paper in the collection is Kit Fine's “Guide to Ground.” This paper offers an illuminating discussion of some of the most central features of ground, along with a clarification of certain of the controversies and confusions surrounding it. Fine considers first the relationship between ground and truth making, then the grammar of ground, before setting out several different, and important, conceptions of ground—factive/nonfactive, full/partial, mediate/immediate, weak/strict, varieties of weak/strict, and distributive/nondistributive. He follows this with a substantive technical discussion of first the pure logic of ground, then the ground of logic, lambda abstraction, and the semantics of ground. The essay closes with a consideration of the relationship between essence and ground—yet another topic that is as much a source of controversy as it is of curiosity in the contemporary literature.As one might expect from the title “Scepticism about Grounding,” Chris Daly's contribution launches an attack on the notion of ground. Unlike other more recent attacks, Daly does not argue, for example, that the notion is explanatorily vacuous but, rather, that it is simply unintelligible. This strategy, Daly believes, is the only real strategy open to skeptics: conceding that grounding is intelligible but neither primitive nor useful leaves skeptics in a position where they have merely damaged the notion of ground, or, inadvertently, put it back on the table. Daly's skeptical strategy involves, on the one hand, appeal to the notion of our philosophical conscience, while, on the other hand, rejecting arguments to the effect that grounding is intelligible.In chapter 3, Paul Audi describes and defends his view of grounding. He denies that grounding is a bridge between degrees of reality, that the grounded facts are an ontological free lunch, that grounding is cross-categorical, that there can be grounding where there are identities, that there is a link between grounding and reduction, and that all uses of the “in virtue of” locution indicate the presence of an underlying grounding relation. He defends the views that grounding is a noncausal determination relation, that it is linked to explanation without claiming that it is explanation, that grounding relations depend upon the natures of the properties they involve, and that the relations only obtain between facts whose properties are essentially connected to one another. Additionally, Audi takes on, and rebuts, some of the complaints registered by the skeptic's about ground (including Daly in this volume), while also registering a degree of sympathy with them.In his “Grounding, Transitivity, and Contrastivity,” Jonathan Schaffer sketches an extension of the contrastive treatment of causation to grounding. Consider the following: the fact that c is a member of S grounds the fact that S has exactly three members. And the fact that S has exactly three members grounds the fact that S has finitely many members. But it doesn't seem correct to say that the fact that c is a member of S grounds the fact that S has finitely many members. A contrastive treatment of the foregoing grounding claims gives us the following: the fact that c is a member of S, rather than not a member of S, grounds the fact that S has exactly three members, rather than exactly two members. But the fact that S has exactly three members, rather than exactly two members, does not ground the fact that S is finite, rather than infinite. Instead, the fact that S has exactly three members, rather than as many members as there are natural numbers, grounds the fact that S is finite, rather than infinite. In short, there just is no chain of difference makers running from c's being a member or not of S to S's being finite or not.In the fifth chapter, “Violations of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Michael Della Rocca delivers the unsettling news that those of us who accept the existence of a multiplicity of objects, and that relations are grounded, accept a view that is in trouble. Della Rocca argues that the Principle of Sufficient Reason—the PSR—as employed by Leibniz, cannot be reconciled with other of Leibniz's commitments. In particular, for a picture of reality on which there are distinct things, the real relations that hold between them will have no grounds, which is a violation of the PSR. This presents a problem for many a modern-day metaphysician when we understand the PSR here as the demand that relations have grounds. Interestingly, in the second part of the paper, Della Rocca argues that the way out of this dilemma is to accept the Spinozistic doctrine of degrees of existence—and therewith the doctrine of degrees of intelligibility—in conjunction with Spinozistic monism. The PSR—the demand for grounds—is not violated where there is only one true substance.In “Requirements on Reality,” J. Robert G. Williams addresses the Moorean challenge faced by those who endorse radically revisionary metaphysics such as nihilism and nominalism. The challenge for proponents of these views is how to reconcile radical revisionism with common sense and the testimony of science. To this end, Williams discusses the deflate and translate strategy of Quine and the syntactic strategies of fictionalists, preferring a view that specifies what he refers to as reality requirements directly. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us, on the one hand, to say what truth requires of reality itself—instead of simply something about syntax and semantics—whilst, on the other hand, avoiding the commitments of the “stratified metaphysician” (such as Fine and Schaffer) to both the derivativeness and reality of our ordinary ontological claims.In her “Varieties of Ontological Dependence,” Kathrin Koslicki argues that even though Fine's nonmodal essentialism allows us to capture the notion of an essence—and with it that of ontological dependence—in a more fine-grained way than modal-existential accounts of essence, Fine's nonmodal account of essence is not yet fine grained enough. Koslicki is of the view that we can ask still further questions as to why it is that entities are essentially ontologically dependent on others. To this end, she introduces two new notions of dependence: constituent dependence and feature dependence. These two notions capture the way in which, say, sets depend on their members, and holes depend on their hosts, respectively. Importantly, Koslicki's account ties ontological explanations of certain kinds to real definitions, in which case, advances in our understanding of the former are to be achieved by way of advances in our understanding of the latter.In chapter 8, the late E. J. Lowe offers a discussion of asymmetric dependence in individuation—also the title of his contribution. He rejects the suggestion made by some structuralists that all facts about the identities of entities within a structure supervene upon relational facts about those structures. He develops and defends a view according to which some entities must be self-individuating where it is these entities that serve to ultimately explain the identities of all the other entities within the system. Lowe's discussion turns crucially on a distinction between identity conditions and principles of individuation—the former of which hold within a world and the latter of which hold across worlds. The significance of this distinction is that while a pure powers theory (given the right kind of asymmetry of structure) can satisfy identity conditions on powers, what it cannot satisfy are the principles of individuation that allow powers at a world to have their identities fully fixed. The only way this is guaranteed is if there are some self-individuating nonpower properties.In “Simple Metaphysics and Ontological Dependence,” Jody Azzouni draws heavily on an existing body of work to expound an idiosyncratic program in metaphysics—simple metaphysics. Simple metaphysicians depart significantly from other kinds of metaphysicians on two fronts: they deny the existence of properties, relations, and tropes; and they adopt the separation thesis, which says that truth-aptness does not require the existence of objects. In order to explain truths, the simple metaphysician relies on the notion of how it is's, where how it is with objects—ways objects are—can serve as truth-makers. Importantly, how it is with objects that aren't referred to by noun phrases in truths can, nonetheless, contribute to the explanation of those truths by inducing truth-values. The upshot is that what explains truths can be both how the world is and, say, indispensability considerations. Ontological dependence, as employed by Azzouni, is not a relation that induces a priority ordering over existents but a way of expressing a connection between truths and how it is with the objects those truths are about.In “Truth-Makers and Dependence,” David Liggins invokes the notion of metaphysical dependence to both resolve a problem for truth-maker theory and raise one. Consider < Socrates is pale>. Do we say that Socrates is pale because Socrates's paleness exists, or that Socrates's paleness exists because Socrates is pale? Benjamin Schnieder (2006) claims it is the latter because, in conceptual explanations, the explanans ought to be simpler than the explanandum—Socrates is conceptually simpler than the trope Socrates's paleness. The problem is, though, that the truth-maker theorist tells us that it is tropes, or facts, that are truth-makers. What Schnieder's account fails to recognize, thinks Liggins, are species of explanation that are neither causal nor conceptual but determinative. Unfortunately, though, the notion of metaphysical dependence is so fruitful that it serves to highlight serious failings with the notion of grounding as typically invoked by the truth-maker theorist. Theories of noncausal dependence do a better job of capturing the dependence of truth on being than the grounding-qua-making relation of traditional truth-maker theory.In “Expressivism about Making and Truth-Making,” Stephen Barker sets out a novel approach to what he refers to as noncausal making: an approach that focuses on the cognitive activities involved in noncausal making talk. His account, as the title suggests, is a kind of expressivism, but one that denies neither that making claims are truth-apt nor that making claims are about the world. Barker argues that claims of the form < Fp1, Fp2,…, Fpnmakes the case Fq> express a commitment to a derivation of q from p1, p2, and so forth, via introduction rules. Much of the paper is then spent setting out and discussing these introduction rules, along with considering some exceptions—subderivations within reductios involve the application of elimination, rather than introduction, rules, for example. In expressing noncausal making statements, one expresses a commitment to constructions that apply what Barker refers to as analytic recipes—recipes that involve inferences from premises that are grounds for the application of a concept.This collection of essays has much to recommend it. On the whole, the essays are accessible and pertinent to a research program that is currently enjoying an enormous amount of attention. No doubt, many, if not all, of the essays in this collection will help shape debates about metaphysical dependence relations, reality, and its structure as they develop in the future. Not only does the collection cover much ground, but it also brings to the reader's attention avenues of research that have so far remained underexplored. One notes, for example, that several of the authors express discomfort with the widely held, and oft-unchallenged, assumption that grounding just is metaphysical explanation, or that the relationship between the two is obvious and straightforward. Other of the authors bring to our attention the role that grounding—or something very much like it—has played in the systems of noteworthy but neglected (in the grounding literature) historical figures such as Leibniz and Bolzano. And still others raise to prominence just how compelling some of the reasons are to be skeptical about the notion of ground.One thing that is clear from the material presented in this volume, however, is that as much as proponents of the notion of ground may disagree with one another over the details, there is no question that an orthodoxy—metaphysical foundationalism—has fast settled upon the research program: reality is hierarchically structured and contains a fundamental level populated by contingent existents. To question these commitments, it has been suggested (although not in this volume), is to ask illegitimate questions, to flout common sense, or to just be so absurd as to not warrant serious consideration. In a research program whose literature can, at places, appear pedantic, it is somewhat striking to observe just how poor so many of the arguments presented in defense of this view actually are. Over in foundational epistemology, on the other hand, a field whose most basic terrain bears a striking resemblance to just this kind of foundational metaphysics, one notes that epistemic foundationalism is by no means the only position to be reckoned with. Both epistemic infinitism and epistemic coherentism are live and respectable views. One can only hope that as discussions in foundational metaphysics evolve, we might come to possess something like substantial, non-question-begging reasons for believing the now orthodox view about reality and its structure. Or, failing this, we might just discover that, as in foundational epistemology, infinitism and coherentism may have something to offer.