My
main research areas are metaphysics and the philosophy of
language. I am especially interested in issues concerning the
metaphysics of modality and the utility and limits of explanation and
reduction in metaphysics. My work is largely sympathetic to the
dictates of common sense aided and corrected by the sciences. I take
metaphysical disputes to pose questions worthy of serious inquiry,
eschewing, by and
large, attempts
to show
that there is less to these disputes than meets the eye. I also
find myself disinclined to radical metaphysical programs that take
metaphysical questions seriously,
but proposeanswers
to them opposed by common sense aided and corrected by the sciences.
ABSTRACT: The causal-historical theory of reference
offers a plausible answer to the question of what it is in
virtue of which a particular use of a name refers to a
particular thing. A famous problem for causal-historical views
involves accounting for reference switch. In this paper, I
propose a solution to this problem. Briefly, the solution is to
recognize an element of deference even in original uses of a
name. We are accustomed to recognizing deference in derived
uses of a name: my use of `Peter', for instance, refers to a
particular apostle partly in virtue of the referential successes
of other members of my community. The extension of this idea to
the case of original uses is less familiar. Despite its
unfamiliarity, I will urge the view that an original use of a
name may, and sometimes does, refer to a particular individual
in virtue of the linguistic conventions governing the
originator's linguistic community together with the referential
successes of other members of that community. This may seem a
somewhat incredible view. But it emerges naturally from a
consideration of certain other puzzles that have not, I think,
gotten the discussion they deserve.
ABSTRACT: Three ideas characterize much recent work on
grounding: (i) that grounding may be conceptually
primitive, in the sense that no helpful analysis or explication in
other terms can or should be given; (ii) that we can theorize
about it nonetheless; and (iii) that applying the resulting
theory sheds light on on central philosophical debates.
In this book, I propose to explore the extent to which this trio of
claims might be vindicated. In particular, I will assume as a
working hypothesis that there is no helpful analysis or explication
of grounding in other terms. (So, for better or worse, there will
be no argument for (i).) I will offer a theory of
grounding. The theorizing will consist in saying in more detail
what grounding is and how it relates to explanations of the relevant
sort, discussing objections to the deployment of a notion of
grounding, and drawing points of contrast between a
grounding-centered approach to relative fundamentality and other
approaches in the literature. I will then show how this theorizing
bears fruit in the investigation of other interesting questions.
Thus, the thesis of the book is that we should embrace the recent
upwelling of theorizing about grounding because it does good
theoretical work: the theory of grounding sheds light when it is
applied to questions in which we were antecedently interested.
ABSTRACT: There is a curious bifurcation in the literature on ground and its
logic. On the one hand, there has been a great deal of work that
presumes that logical complexity invariably yields grounding. So,
for instance, it is widely presumed that any fact stated by a true
conjunction is grounded in those stated by its conjuncts, that any
fact stated by a true disjunction is grounded in that stated by
any of its true disjuncts, and that any fact stated by a true
double negation is grounded in that stated by the doubly-negated
formula. This commitment is encapsulated in the system GG
axiomatized and semantically characterized in
[deRosset and Fine, 2023] (following [Fine, 2012b]). On the
other hand, there has been a great deal of important formal work
on "flatter" theories of ground, yielding logics very different
from GG [Correia, 2010] [Fine, 2016, 2017c]. For
instance, these theories identify the fact stated by a
self-conjunction (P v P) with that stated by its
conjunct P. Since, in these systems, no fact grounds itself,
the "flatter" theories are inconsistent with the principles of
GG. This bifurcation raises the question of whether
there is a single notion of ground suited to fulfill the
philosophical ambitions of grounding enthusiasts. There is, at
present, no unified semantic framework employing a single
conception of ground for simultaneously characterizing both GG
and the "flatter" approaches. This paper fills this
gap by specifying such a framework and demonstrating its
adequacy.
"Abstraction and Grounding" (with Øystein Linnebo). Forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
ABSTRACT: Many philosophers and other thinkers have been
attracted to the idea that some objects are metaphysically
“cheap”: their existence does not demand very much of
reality. An influential version of this idea appeals to
abstractionist views in the philosophy of mathematics, on which
numbers and other mathematical objects are somehow abstracted
from other phenomena. Contemporary discussions of
abstractionism often focus on what’s called Hume’s Principle,
which states that two collections have the same number just in
case they are equinumerous, in the sense that they can be
correlated one-to-one:
(HP) #xx=#yy iff xx∼yy.
The principal aim of this article is to use the notion of
grounding to develop this sort of abstractionism. More
specifically, we argue that the appeal to grounding enables a
unified response to the two main challenges that confront
abstractionism. The first challenge is to provide an
interpretation the metaphor of metaphysical “cheapness”. The
second challenge is to rebut the “bad company” objection, which
rejects abstraction principles like (HP) on the grounds of their
apparent similarity to inconsistent principles like Frege’s
Basic Law V. By enforcing a simple requirement that all
abstraction be properly grounded, we aim to provide a unified
solution to two hard, and prima facie unrelated, problems. On
the view we develop, grounded abstraction simultaneously ensures
thin abstracta and permissible abstraction. .
ABSTRACT: This paper provides a sound and complete
semantics for a system GG containing the truth-functional
operators that is closely related to the truth-functional part
of the system of (Fine, 2012).
ABSTRACT: A number of puzzles concerning how
truth-ascriptions are grounded have recently been discovered by
several theorists, following Fine (2010). Most previous
commentators on these puzzles have taken them to shed light on
the theory of ground. In this paper, I argue that they also shed
light on the theory of truth. In particular, I argue that the
notion of ground can be deployed to clearly articulate one
strand of deflationary thinking about truth, according to which
truth is ``metaphysically lightweight.'' I will propose a
ground-theoretic explication of the (entirely bearable)
lightness of truth, and then show how this broadly deflationary
view yields a novel solution to the puzzles concerning how truth
is grounded. So, if the proposal I sketch is on target, the
theory of truth and the theory of ground interact fruitfully: we
can apply the notion of ground to offer a clear explication of
the deflationist claim that truth is ``metaphysically
lightweight'' that both captures the motivations for that claim
and solves the puzzles.
ABSTRACT: The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a
picture on which our scientific theories exhibit a layered
structure of dependence and determination. Economics is dependent
on and determined by psychology; psychology in its turn is,
plausibly, dependent on and determined by biology; and so it goes.
It is tempting to explain this layered structure of dependence and
determination among our theories by appeal to a corresponding
layered structure of dependence and determination among the
entities putatively treated by those theories. In this paper, I
argue that we can resist this temptation: we can explain the sense
in which, e.g., the biological truths are dependent on and
determined by chemical truths without appealing to properly
biological or chemical entities. This opens the door to a view on
which, though there are more truths than just the purely physical
truths, there are no entities, states, or properties other than
the purely physical entities, states, and properties. I argue
that some familiar strategies to explicate the idea of a layered
structure of theories by appeal to reduction, ground, and
truthmaking encounter difficulties. I then show how these
difficulties point the way to a more satisfactory treatment which
appeals to something very close to the notion of ground. Finally,
I show how this treatment provides a theoretical setting in which
we might fruitfully frame debates about which entities there
really are.
ABSTRACT: Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over
the past few years exploring the nature and significance of
grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to
this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal
features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a
language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a
system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features,
and offered a semantics which interprets the
language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a
number of problems. In this paper, I review the problems and
offer an alternative that avoids them. I offer a semantics for
the pure logic of ground that is motivated by ideas already
present in the grounding literature, and for which a natural
axiomatization capturing central formal features of grounding
is sound and complete. I also show how the semantics I offer
avoids the problems faced by Fine’s semantics.
ABSTRACT: In "Analyticity and Ontology" I argued that
there are counterexamples to the claim that sentences
analytically entailed by a claim P require nothing more
of the world for their truth than does P. John Horden
has offered interesting criticisms of this argument. Here I
reply to Horden's criticisms and briefly indicate what I take
their lesson to be.
ABSTRACT: Analyticity theorists, as I will call
them, endorse the doctrine of analyticity in ontology:
if some truth P analytically entails the existence of certain
things, then a theory that contains P but does not claim that
those things exist is no more ontologically parsimonious than a
theory that also claims that they exist. Suppose, for
instance, that the existence of a table in certain location is
analytically entailed by the existence and features of certain
particles in that location. The doctrine implies that the
table's existence requires nothing more of the world than that
those particles exist and bear the features in question.
Analyticity theorists have alleged that this idea may be used
to defend controversial existence claims against a battery of
objections. I argue that this style of defense fails, because
the doctrine faces counter-examples. An existence claim may be
analytically entailed by some truth and still report a
substantial further fact. These counter-examples suggest a
picture according to which the theoretical utility of
analyticity in the investigation of extra-linguistic reality is
virtually nil.
ABSTRACT: Though the study of grounding is still in the
early stages, Kit Fine, in "The Pure Logic of Ground", has made a
seminal attempt at formalization. Formalization of this sort is
supposed to bring clarity and precision to our theorizing, as it
has to the study of other metaphysically important phenomena,
like modality and vagueness. Unfortunately, as I will argue,
Fine ties the formal treatment of grounding to the obscure notion
of a weak ground. The obscurity of weak ground, together
with its centrality in Fine's system, threatens to undermine the
extent to which this formalization offers clarity and precision.
In this paper, I show how to overcome this problem. I describe a
system, the logic of strict ground (LSG), and a translation
scheme for interpreting Fine's weak grounding claims in the
language of LSG; I show that the interpretation verifies all of
the principles of Fine's system; and I show that derivability in
Fine's system can be exactly characterized in terms of the
derivability of its interpretations in LSG. I conclude that
Fine's system is reducible to LSG.
ABSTRACT: A compelling idea holds that reality has a
layered structure. We often disagree about what inhabits the
bottom layer (or even if there is one), but we agree that higher up
we find chemical, biological, geological, psychological,
sociological, economic, etc., entities: molecules, human beings,
diamonds, mental states, cities, interest rates, and so on. How is
this intuitive talk of a layered structure of entities to be
understood? Traditionally, philosophers have proposed to
understand layered structure in terms of either reduction or
supervenience. But these traditional views face
well-known problems. A plausible alternative is that layered
structure is to be explicated by appeal to explanations of a
certain sort, termed grounding explanations. Grounding
explanations tell us what obtains in virtue of what.
Unfortunately, the use of grounding explanations to articulate the
layered conception faces a problem, which I call the collapse. The
collapse turns on the question of how to ground the facts stated by
the explanations themselves. In this paper I make a suggestion
about how to ground explanations that avoids the collapse.
Briefly, the suggestion is that the fact stated by a grounding
explanation is grounded in its explanans.
ABSTRACT: Kit Fine, in "The Pure Logic of Ground", has made
a seminal attempt at formalizing the notion of ground. Fine ties
the formal treatment of grounding to the notion of a weak
ground. Formalization of this sort is supposed to bring clarity
and precision to our theorizing. Unfortunately, as I will argue,
it's not clear what weak ground is. I review five alternative
explanations of the idea, and argue that none of them are
ultimately satisfactory. I close by outlining a more complicated
explanation of the notion that turns out to be more satisfactory.
ABSTRACT: Among the most remarkable developments in
metaphysics since the 1950's is the explosion of philosophical
interest in possible worlds. Inspired by technical advances in
quantified modal logic, philosophers explored the idea that the
metaphysical theory of possible worlds could serve as a
foundation for theories of modality. I propose an explanation of
what possible worlds are, and argue that this proposal, the
interpreted models conception, should be attractive to
anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to
be explained in terms of some non-modal notion of ``possible
world.'' I articulate three constraints on any acceptable
primitivist explanation of the nature of possible worlds and show
that the interpreted models conception meets the three
constraints.
"No Free Lunch", in
Varieties of Dependence: Grounding, Supervience, Response-Dependence, Steinberg, Hoetlje, and
Schnieder, eds., Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013.
ABSTRACT: A familiar and plausible view holds that reality
comes in layers: at the bottom are (perhaps) the physical
entities. Higher up, we find chemical, biological, geological,
psychological, sociological, economic, etc., entities:
molecules, human beings, diamonds, mental states, nations,
interest rates, and so on. The higher-level entities are "an
ontological free lunch", because their existence and features
are completely explicable in terms of the existence and features
of lower-level entities. In this sense, higher-level entities
are "nothing over and above" lower-level entities. In
this paper, I apply the central argument of "Getting
Priority Straight" to show that this layered conception of
reality faces a problem: barring reduction, every entity is
fundamental, in the sense that some of its features are
explanatorily basic.
ABSTRACT: A philosophical standard in the debates
concerning material constitution is the case of a statue and a
lump of clay, Lumpl and Goliath respectively. According to the
story, Lumpl and Goliath are coincident throughout their
respective careers. Monists hold that they are
identical; pluralists that they are distinct. This paper
is concerned with a particular objection to pluralism, the
Grounding Problem. The objection is roughly that the
pluralist faces a legitimate explanatory demand to explain
various differences she alleges between Lumpl and Goliath, but
that the pluralist's theory lacks to resources to give any such
explanation. In this paper, I explore the question of whether
there really is any problem of this sort. I argue (i)
that explanatory demands that are clearly legitimate are easy
for the pluralist to meet; (ii) that even in cases of
explanatory demands whose legitimacy is questionable the
pluralist has some overlooked resources; and (iii) there
is some reason for optimism about the pluralist's prospects for
meeting every legitimate explanatory demand. In short, no
clearly adequate statement of a Grounding Problem is extant, and
there is some reason to believe that the pluralist can overcome
any Grounding Problem that we haven't thought of yet.
ABSTRACT: A standard view of reference holds that a
speaker's use of a name refers to a certain thing in virtue of
the speaker's associating a condition with that use that
singles the referent out. This view has been criticized by
Saul Kripke as empirically inadequate. Recently, however, it
has been argued that a version of the standard view, a
response-based theory of reference, survives the charge of
empirical inadequacy by allowing that associated conditions
may be largely or even entirely implicit. This paper argues
that response-based theories of reference are prey to a
variant of the empirical inadequacy objection, because they
are ill-suited to accommodate the successful use of proper
names by pre-school children. Further, I argue that there is
reason to believe that normal adults are, by and large, no
different from children with respect to how the referents of
their names are determined. I conclude that speakers typically
refer positionally: the referent of a use of a proper
name is typically determined by aspects of the speaker's
position, rather than by associated conditions present,
however implicitly, in her psychology.
ABSTRACT: Consider the kinds of macroscopic concrete
objects that common sense and the sciences allege to exist:
tables, raindrops, tectonic plates, galaxies, and the rest. Are
there any such things? Opinions differ. Ontological
liberals say they do; ontological radicals say they
don't. Liberalism seems favored by its plausible acquiescence to
the dictates of common sense abetted by science; radicalism by
its ontological parsimony. Priority theorists claim we
can have the virtues of both views. They hold that tables,
raindrops, etc., exist, but they aren't fundamental. The
ontological liberal's ontology provides the correct inventory of
existent individuals. The ontological radical's more restricted
ontology provides the correct inventory of fundamental
individuals. The priority theorist claims that the derivative
individuals are ``no addition in being'' to the fundamental
ones, so we can have our cake and eat it too. It would be nice
if priority theorists were right. In this paper I argue, with
regret, that they are not. One upshot is that the sort of
explanations which underwrite the priority theorist's
distinction between fundamental and derivative individuals do
not mitigate our ontological commitments. Another is that we
still have to choose between the charms of liberalism and
radicalism.
ABSTRACT: A major source of latter-day skepticism about
necessity is the work of David Hume. Hume is widely taken to
have endorsed the Humean claim: there are no necessary
connections between distinct existences. The Humean claim is
defended on the grounds that necessary connections between
wholly distinct things would be mysterious and
inexplicable. Philosophers deploy this claim in the service of a
wide variety of philosophical projects. But Saul Kripke has
argued that it is false. According to Kripke, there are
necessary connections between distinct existences; in
particular, there are necessary connections between material
objects and their material origins. In this paper I argue that
the primary motivation for the Humean claim, Hume's
datum, also motivates the key premise in an argument for the
necessity of origins. The very considerations that the Humean
takes to show that necessary connections between wholly distinct
things would be mysterious and inexplicable indicate that there
must be some such necessary connections. Thus, in the absence of
alternative support, there is no reason to believe the Humean
claim.
ABSTRACT: In `A New Route to the Necessity of Origin' we
offered an argument for the thesis that there are necessary
connections between material things and their material
origins. Much of the philosophical interest lay in our claim that
the argument did not depend on so-called sufficiency principles
for crossworld identity. It has been the verdict of much recent
work on the necessity of origin that valid arguments for the
thesis require some such sufficiency principle as a premise but
that such principles are deeply problematic. These claims are now
the subject of a pair of insightful critiques by Robertson and
Forbes, and Cameron and Roca. Both critiques identify a weakness
in the formulation of the key premise of our argument, the
locality of prevention. Here we argue that the right lesson to
draw is that the old formulation of locality is inadequate to
express the underlying intuitions about prevention that were our
starting point. We suggest how that formulation may be improved
without injury to the argument.
ABSTRACT: Saul Kripke has claimed that there are
necessary connections between material things and their material
origins. The usual defenses of such necessity of origin theses
appeal to either a sufficiency of origin principle or a
branching-times model of necessity. In this paper we offer a
different defense. Our argument proceeds from more modest
`independence principles', which govern the processes by which
material objects are produced. Independence principles are
motivated, in turn, by appeal to a plausible metaphysical
principle governing such processes, their invulnerability to
non-local prevention. We outline the new argument, and
distinguish it from both of the usual defenses.
Surveys and Reviews
"What is Conservatism?," Analysis
80(3):514-33, July 2020. This piece is
part of a symposium in Analysis on Dan Korman's Objects:
Nothing Out of the Ordinary].
ABSTRACT: In Objects: Nothing Out of the
Ordinary, Daniel Z. Korman defends a view
he calls conservatism. Conservatives hold that there
are ordinary objects, but no extraordinary
objects. But Korman never explicitly characterizes what would
qualify an object as ordinary in the relevant sense. We
have some paradigm cases of ordinary objects, including tables,
dogs, and trees; and we have some paradigm cases of
extraordinary objects of sorts familiar from the philosophical
literature. Here I attempt to fill this gap, surveying a
number of attempts to characterize the commitments of
conservatism. All fail. In particular, no specification of
what it takes for an object to be ordinary is both plausible and
consistent with the conservative verdicts on the paradigms. I
argue that this is no coincidence, since it turns out to be
implausible in light of the results of settled science to deny
the existence of one of Korman's
paradigms of an extraordinary object. The upshot is that
plausibility requires being a little more liberal than
conservatism seems to allow.
ABSTRACT: It is difficult to wander far in contemporary
metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And
reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It
can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has
even found its way into linguistics and decision theory. But
what are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists
in these disciplines all appeal? This paper sets out and
evaluates a leading contemporary theory of possible worlds,
David Lewis's Modal Realism. I note two competing ambitions for
a theory of possible worlds: that it be reductive and
user-friendly. I then outline Modal Realism and consider
objections to the effect that it cannot satisfy these ambitions.
I conclude that there is some reason to believe that Modal
Realism is not reductive and overwhelming reason to believe that
it is not user-friendly.
"Possible Worlds II: Nonreductive Theories of Possible Worlds" Philosophy Compass, 4(6) 2009.
[.pdf]
ABSTRACT: It is difficult to wander far in contemporary
metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. But
reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It
can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has
even found its way into linguistics and decision theory. What
are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in
these disciplines all appeal? Some have hoped that a theory of
possible worlds can be used to reduce modality to non-modal
terms. This paper sets reductive theories aside, and
articulates and applies a framework for evaluating nonreductive
theories of possible worlds. I argue that, if we abjure
reduction, we should aim for a theory of possible worlds that is
\emph{user-friendly}. I then outline four leading contemporary
theories and consider objections to each. My conclusions are
negative: every theory we discuss fails to be user-friendly in
some significant respect.
