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What Work the Fundamental?

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Abstract

Although it is very often taken for granted that there is something fundamental, the literature appears to have developed with little to no careful consideration of what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are supposed to do. If we are to have a good reason to believe that there is something fundamental, we need not only to know what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are invoked for, but why it is that nothing else is available for the task to hand. A good argument in defense of fundamentality, then, will contain an assumption that stipulates an explanatory target; along with a second, crucial, assumption that tells us that no dependent entity is available to do the work that needs to be done. In this paper, I explore both of these assumptions.

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Notes

  1. See Trogdon and Cowling (unpublished drafts), Dasgupta (2016), Raven (2016), Schaffer (2010) and Sider (2011) for presentations of such views. In fact the overwhelming number of papers in the burgeoning literature on grounding assume that there is something fundamental.

  2. See Fine (2013).

  3. See Barnes (2012), Cameron (2008), Dasgupta (2016), Raven (2016) and Schaffer (2009). It is worth pointing out that several authors have suggested that there need not be anything fundamental—see Bliss (2013), Bohn (2018), Morganti (2018), Schaffer (2003), Tahko (2014) and Thompson (2016). That a smattering of papers have suggested alternative views does not, however, entail that there is not a prevailing one. Moreover, it is not simply in the grounding literature that one encounters appeal to the idea that there is something fundamental. Appeals to fundamentality can be found through much of the recent analytic literature.

  4. Facts are kinds of entities or things and my discussion in these terms should be taken to extend to a fact only account of grounding, and not to exclude it.

  5. See Thompson (2016) for a discussion of some of the problems with understanding metaphysical explanation in these ways.

  6. See Raven (2016) for a discussion of an alternate way of understanding fundamentality.

  7. See Dixon (2016) and Rabin and Rabern (2016) for very good discussions of what philosophers seem to mean, and what they ought to mean, when they talk about the well-foundedness of grounding.

  8. Although Cameron (2008) extols an argument from theoretical virtue, he is explicit that what he is really defending is an intuition. See Trogdon and Cowling (unpublished drafts) as an example of the latter approach.

  9. Colyvan (2000), amongst others, for example, have discussed the explanatory criterion of ontological commitment, according to which we should only commit to entities that are indispensible to our best explanations. For these philosophers ontological commitment is intimately tied to explanatory work.

  10. See Morganti (2014) for a discussion of infinitism.

  11. Cameron (2008) is often taken as the death knell for inductive arguments in defence of fundamentality. He argues there that the best that we can do is advance an argument from theoretical virtue. Whilst I agree with Cameron’s analysis of the failings of the arguments he does discuss, I do not agree with his conclusion that we are left with nothing but appeal to theoretical virtue in defence of what is ultimately an intuition. I believe there are potential arguments in defence of fundamentality that Cameron does not address.

  12. See Trogdon and Cowling (unpublished drafts) p. 2.

  13. See Morganti (2018) and Tahko (2014) for examples of the former and Priest (2014) for an example of the latter.

  14. I understand the term ‘dependent entity’ very broadly here. I take it that a dependence chain (chain of dependent things ordered by a metaphysical dependence relation) is a kind of dependent entity. To ask why there is a collection of dependent entities taken together could well be understood as a question regarding the collection of dependence chains. In this case, the metaphysics of the collection of (all) dependence chains will still need to be evaluated. I believe that the cases considered in the subsequent discussion will apply equally well to the totality of dependence chains. For brief discussions of how concerns over explaining dependence chains in the context of fundamentality can be handled, see Bliss (2013) and Cameron (2008).

  15. Schaffer (2010, p. 62). Elsewhere, he states ‘there must be a ground of being. If one thing exists only in virtue of another, then there must be something from which the reality of the derivative entities ultimately derives’ (Schaffer 2010, p. 37).

  16. Dasgupta (2016, p. 5)

  17. Fine (2010, p. 105). I am aware that Fine may well not have intended this remark to serve as a reason to suppose that there is something fundamental. Whether Fine intended it as such, one could still use this remark as a means of arguing in defence of fundamentality.

  18. Schaffer (2010).

  19. Schaffer’s argument is, in fact, an argument from vicious infinite regress. For a discussion of arguments from vicious infinite regress, and why we are supposed to find them problematic, see Bliss (2013), Nolan (2001) and Passmore (1970, ch. 4). In particular, authors have been very quick to point out that a regress being ordered by a relation of grounding or metaphysical dependence is a sufficient condition for its being vicious. I think this is a mistake. Infinite regresses ordered by metaphysical dependence relations are not necessarily vicious. Whether or not a regress is vicious is always relative to an explanatory project. What such explanatory projects might be, for the likes of Schaffer who believe the regress to be vicious, is very much the subject of matter of this paper.

  20. For discussions of grounding, irreflexivity and why we should or should not accept it see Bliss (2018), Jenkins (2011) and Raven (2013).

  21. See Bliss (2013, 2014). See also Aikin (2005), Klein (2003) and Passmore (1970) for a discussion of this shift in explanatory task as a feature of arguments from vicious infinite regress.

  22. The deft reader might immediately note that we are now circling in old and familiar waters. Cosmological arguments to the existence of God have long been concerned with these sorts of cosmological questions—why do any contingent things exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Amongst still others. And in the more recent relevant literature, these questions have always been formulated contrastively.

  23. That Schaffer means to be seeking an explanation for being on a restricted domain would seem to be supported by the comment ‘The foundationalist requirement is not supposed to be a merely accidental truth of actuality. It is supposed to follow from the need for a ground of being, from which any derivative entities derive’ (Schaffer 2010, p. 62) [italics my own].

  24. As a collection of dependent entities would itself be a dependent entity, I assume that the assumption as stipulated also precludes the possibility of a collection of dependent entities jointly explaining why there are any dependent entities whatsoever.

  25. This argument assumes that being dependent and being fundamental are exclusive and exhaustive. For an argument against the exclusivity assumption, see Barnes (2012).

  26. See Maitzen (2012), Maitzen (2013), Pruss (1998) and Rasmussen (2010) for examples.

  27. See Maitzen (2013) and Rowe (1997, p. 190).

  28. It is no good to claim that regresses must terminate because our explanatory chains must come to an end. Exactly what we are seeking to understand is the reason that our chains must terminate.

  29. Versions of the argument that target complete metaphysical explanations would seem to beg the question twice over if the never-ending-question objection is what motivates their commitment to the no-circularity assumption.

  30. Passmore (1970, ch. 5) understands the distinction between vicious and benign infinite regresses in exactly this way. Reference removed.

  31. See Bliss (2013, pp. 410–413) and Passmore (1970, p. 31). Karen (2011, p. 31) would also appear to be alluding to this kind of problem where she discusses reasons to think that grounding cannot itself be grounded. She describes the problem as ‘a particular kind of failure of reductive explanation’.

  32. One might think that the same question objection does provide us with a reason to endorse the externality assumption, namely, that we make no explanatory progress. But the pertinent question then seems to be, what principled reason have we for supposing we don’t make progress? Without further investigation, we are left to simply say ‘because no dependent entity can explain why there are any dependent entities’, which is, of course, exactly the view that we are seeking a justification for.

  33. Maitzen (2013, p. 263). I replace his ‘CCT’ (contingent, concrete thing) with ‘dependent entities’.

  34. See Keefe (2002) for a discussion of ways in which explanations that fit this structure can be unproblematic, and Maitzen (2013, p. 264) for an elaboration of the same point.

  35. This principle is also alluded to in Lowe (2003, p. 91), amongst other of his work, for example.

  36. Maitzen (2013, p. 260). I have slightly modified this principle as it appears in Maitzen. He makes reference in the original formulation of the principle to individual substances. I have removed this owing to complexities associated with how notions of metaphysical dependence/independence are thought by some to interact with the notion of substance. Thank you to an anonymous referee for pointing out this potential issue.

  37. See Maitzen (2013) for a nice discussion of this point.

  38. One might worry that what I have suggested here seems to conflict with my earlier stated understanding of grounding. If this is the case, I take myself to be suggesting here that we, in fact, might need to rethink some aspects of how we think about grounding.

  39. There is going to be a wrinkle here if ‘dependent entity’ turns out to be a dummy sortal (see subsequent discussion). If this is the case, some disambiguations of the term may well generate questions that are answerable in terms of the existence of Obama. I think we can allow that this is possible whilst still taking the general point that there are importantly different explanatory projects being invoked here.

  40. According to the full-blown PSR, every fact has an explanation (or some equally unrestricted variation on this). The full-blown PSR cannot be what motivates foundationalism as, where every fact has an explanation, there is nothing fundamental. One way of circumventing this problem is to allow that some facts, at least, are self-explanatory. That way, every fact can have an explanation so long as we allow that there can be self-explanatory fundamental facts (where to be fundamental must be redefined as something like fundamental\(_{df}\): that which is fundamental is independent of anything else).

  41. Thank you to Filippo Casati for a helpful discussion on this point.

  42. Recall, also, that I have argued in an earlier section of this paper that in order to justify committing to fundamentality there needs to be some theoretical work (in particular explanatory work) for the fundamentalia to do. The concern I raise for the dependence PSR is consistent with that commitment.

  43. See Dasgupta (2016).

  44. See Bohn (2018), who also takes issue with the restriction of the explanatory domain.

  45. Not to mention that there are, I believe, a number of subtly different questions in the vicinity. We might interpret Dasgupta as being in the business of addressing the question ‘why did the dependent things turn out this way rather than some other way?’, for example.

  46. See for example, Lowe (2007, 2009).

  47. See Lowe (2007) and Thomasson (2007, ch. 3).

  48. See for example Lowe (2009), Thomasson (2007, esp. 6.2) and Wiggins (1967).

  49. It is possible to ascertain how many watches, shoes, books, etc, you got for Christmas. But it is not possible to ascertain how many things you received if ‘thing’ is not just acting as a covering term for proper sortal terms. At least this, or something like it, is how the proponent of the dummy sortal will argue. See Maitzen (2013) and Thomasson (2007, ch. 11, especially p. 196).

  50. See Lowe (2009, ch. 2) and Thomasson (2007, esp. ch. 3 and 6).

  51. Maitzen [2013 (esp. pp. 260–263)] has argued that ‘contingent thing’ is a dummy sortal, and therefore, that a certain kind of cosmological argument to the existence of God is defective. He also draws attention to interesting consequences of this for whether or not we need an ultimate explainer. If Maitzen is correct about this, then a similar case can be made in regard to the kind of argument I am discussing here in defence of fundamentality.

  52. For a much more thorough discussion of KI, dummy sortals and arguments in defence of fundamentality [see Bliss (unpublished drafts)].

  53. Many thanks are owed to many people for their help over the very, very long time it took me to refine this material. Shamik Dasgupta, Nicholas Jones, Donnchadh O’Conaill, Graham Priest, Kelly Trogdon, Nathan Wildman, in addition to audiences in Hamburg, Helsinki, CUNY, Geneva, Grand Rapids, Kyoto and Gothenburg are all gratefully acknowledged. Special debts of gratitude are owed to Filippo Casati for reading and rereading drafts of this paper and giving very fine feedback, and to Stephen Maitzen for his generosity with a stranger. Finally the Alexander von Humboldt foundation is to be acknowledged for having funded this research.

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    Ricki Bliss

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Bliss, R. What Work the Fundamental?. Erkenn 84, 359–379 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9962-7

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