Abstract
Motivated by avoiding a difficulty confronting the usual formulations of identity criteria, Fine (Philos Stud 173:1–19, 2016) has proposed and developed a generic account of grounding. In this paper, I examine two versions of the account (one in terms of arbitrary objects, and the other in terms of metaphysical laws). I argue that both proposals fail, as it is difficult to see how the strategy of ‘going generic’ can really solve the problem. I conclude that the idea of generic grounding is mysterious and unmotivated.
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Notes
For those who would like to resist such a ground-theoretic reading, and regard identity criteria as nothing more than necessary and sufficient conditions for identity, the problem to be discussed here would not even arise in the first place. But then, there would be no need to postulate ‘generic grounding’ either. So, in what follows, I will simply assume that identity criteria should be interpreted ground-theoretically, and hence the arrows are always used in this grounding loaded sense unless explicitly noted otherwise.
Fine’s (2016) criticism of the universal formulation is, in fact, much more complicated than is presented here. For on the one hand, he concedes that there might be good reasons to resist the idea that (3) is implausible and to insist that a’s having the same members as itself does ground its self-identity (2016, pp. 7–8). But on the other hand, he still thinks that the ‘general formulation’ (i.e. the usual formulation in terms of universal quantification) is defective for more complicated reasons. As he writes,
[I]t seems to me that the general formulation is defective, though not for the reasons that have usually been given. In the first place, even though many instances of the general formulation may with some plausibility be taken to hold there are some instances that cannot plausibly be taken to hold. In the second place, the various instances, even if supposed true, do not provide a proper basis for the generic claim… (2016, p. 10)
However, this second point is somewhat curious. For why should we regard the formulation as problematic on the ground that its instances fail to provide a proper basis for the generic claim? Fine seems to think that it is problematic because in such a case ‘the truth of the instances turns on the truth of the generic claim, rather than the other way round’ (p. 10). But I do not see why we should expect them even to provide a basis for the generic claim in the first place. So, in this paper, I will assume that the problem here is the intuitive falsehood that follows from the universal formulation, so as to see whether Fine’s proposal by going generic can solve it. For those who do not find (3) problematic in the first place, I think that, contrary to what Fine suggests, they should have no problems accepting the universal formulation and hence also have no motivations for going generic either.
For a survey of these suggestions, see (Shumener 2017).
Here I assume that generic grounding in terms of lambda abstractions is a kind of explanatory connection that can be understood as a metaphysical law. Some may think that such an idea is quite obscure, for it is not clear what kind of explanation is involved here. Since I am inclined to agree that the idea of generic grounding is obscure, I cannot really say too much about it. But presumably, the idea is that a law as a higher-order connection governs and thus explains its first-order instances by imposing certain constraints on them. However, as I will argue below, I do not think that such an idea works for generic grounding.
For quite similar reasons, Fine urges us to acknowledge a form of explanation whose explanandum is a ‘condition’ (e.g. the set-identity relation) rather than a particular truth (e.g. a first-order truth of identity). He then conjectures that it is precisely such a failure to acknowledge this form of explanation that somehow keeps philosophers away from formulating identity criteria as generic. As he writes, “The critics … were so convinced that explanations had to be explanations of particular truths that they were unable to see how an explanation of an identity condition could amount to anything more than the explanation of its instances and this led them, in its turn, to fatally misconstrue the role of identity criteria in providing such explanations” (2016, p. 18).
See (Glazier 2016, p. 23) for a similar example.
See (Skow 2016) for a detailed account of the relationship between explanation and why-questions.
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Acknowledgements
Funding was provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant No. 108‑2410‑H‑002‑017‑MY2). I would like to thank the audience at the 2017 Joint Session in Edinburgh and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
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Deng, DM. The Myth of Generic Grounding. Erkenn 87, 2053–2061 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00282-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00282-9