Abstract
One of the main trends in metaphysics in recent years has been the development and defense of novel conceptual frameworks for representing facts about fundamentality. Of particular interest has been the concept of grounding. Often the introduction of these new concepts is motivated by the argument that other notions metaphysicians use in order to frame their positions are inadequate to the task of characterizing the important problems and views of metaphysics. These suggestions have been met with mixed reactions in philosophical circles. Some of those working on first-order metaphysical problems were quick to see the utility of these notions. However, in philosophy of mind, these proposals have been met with skepticism. A commonly voiced complaint is that these metaphysical concepts are philosophically superfluous; they add nothing to the concepts philosophers of mind have already had in their toolboxes for years. I will argue that by deploying the conceptual distinctions introduced by especially Fine, we are able to resolve debates that have been carrying on in the philosophy of mind for decades by formulating novel, clear, and conciliatory positions.
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Notes
- 1.
Witmer et al. (2005) defend a related “in virtue of” notion.<Para>Ref. “Bennett (2001)” is cited in text but not provided in the reference list. Please provide details in the list or delete the citation from the text. Bennett (2011) speaks of “building.”
- 2.
Why have metaphysicians limited themselves to physical, logical, mereological, and modal notions? Daniel Nolan discusses this issue in his (2014).
- 3.
This is a principle frequently appealed to by Jaegwon Kim and others in the metaphysics of mind. It says that for something to be real it must possess causal powers.
- 4.
In other work, I apply these resources to debates in the philosophy of causation and mental causation.
- 5.
Of course, there exists a diverse variety of ways of understanding the constitution and realization relations. The differences among them will not matter for what follows. Note that I will not discuss supervenience and necessitation as these notions have been widely recognized for years in the philosophy of mind to be insufficient to characterize the sense in which mental phenomena may be ontologically dependent on physical phenomena. See Kim (1984) and Wilson (2005).
- 6.
Here I am using ‘dependence’ to indicate a relation such that when it obtains, it need not imply that one of the relata is more fundamental than the other. (Ontological dependence is not an asymmetric relation.) When I speak of the obtaining of an ontological priority relation, what is prior is thereby implied to be more fundamental than what it is prior to.
- 7.
Fine’s official view is that this operator (and the grounding operator to be described shortly) should be taken to apply to sentences (2012, p. 46), but he sometimes speaks of propositions grounding other propositions. I will sometimes speak loosely as well of facts grounding other facts. This should be understood as indicating the grounding of a sentence describing one fact in some sentences describing some other facts.
- 8.
See Fine (2009) for an explanation of the distinction.
- 9.
- 10.
One indication of this is that one could have expressed the same thing by saying instead of ‘There is a mess in the kitchen,’ ‘The kitchen is a mess.’ If she was trying to express something about the deep metaphysics of the situation, these would not be equivalent.
- 11.
In outlining this third way for how it may be that a sentence is true, yet not true in reality, I am departing from Fine’s official view. Fine’s descriptions of cases involving sentences that are not true in reality generally involve subjectivity such as we find in the first two accounts above. However, as I will now argue, this third way also constitutes a way in which a sentence may be true while not correctly describing the intrinsic structure of a given situation.
- 12.
This would be to endorse what is usually called an occupant or realizer functionalism about messes. Messes are the things that occupy the mess-role.
- 13.
A good predecessor to what I am suggesting here is Ryle’s (1949) discussion of category mistakes.
- 14.
A complication arises here in that (7) refers to Tom, a human being, and that we should not think of facts about human beings as generally ungrounded. Let’s postpone this issue and just ask the question of whether (7) is grounded relative to its ascription of pain.
- 15.
There is a question about whether we need the concept of real as well. Wilson allows that we need at least something like this, a concept of fundamentality.
- 16.
And recall Putnam (1967) on pain: “Consider what the brain-state theorist has to do to make good his claims. He has to specify a physical-chemical state such that any organism (not just a mammal) is in pain if and only if (a) it possesses a brain of a suitable physical –chemical structure; and (b) its brain is in that physical-chemical state.”
- 17.
It is clear that many who have followed Fodor in adopting nonreductive physicalism want more, want to say that many special sciences claims aren’t just true and justified but also that they refer to ‘additional’ higher-level special science kinds. However, there does not seem to be any justification for this further ontological claim and there are reasons (those noted by Kim) against it.
- 18.
See Loewer (2009) for a discussion of this issue.
- 19.
Here, I am considering proposals for the full, as opposed to partial, grounds for (7). See the distinction in Fine (2012).
- 20.
This represents a position in the ballpark of what is proposed in <Para>Ref. “Dennett (1991)” is cited in text but not provided in the reference list. Please provide details in the list or delete the citation from the text. Dennett (1991). The fact that this view shows how Dennett’s position is able to accommodate true phenomenal claims is also a virtue of the account, but one I do not have the space to explore here.
- 21.
Recall the discussion of various views about mess talk.
- 22.
In fairness to Gillett, he isn’t defending compositional reductionism in his paper, only aiming to set it out as an interesting view worthy of consideration. He presents the complaint I just made as a puzzle that those who want to advocate the position would have to solve. I am arguing that it is not a problem for the different view I propose here.
- 23.
They were developed independently.
- 24.
I thank Ken Aizawa, Louise Antony, Jamin Asay, Carrie Figdor, Kit Fine, Carl Gillett, Jens Harbecke, Kerry McKenzie, Kelly Trogdon, and especially Jessica Wilson for comments and criticism that led to substantial improvements of this chapter.
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Ney, A. (2016). Grounding in the Philosophy of Mind: A Defense. In: Aizawa, K., Gillett, C. (eds) Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground. New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56216-6_10
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