Abstract
A respectable assessment of priority-based ontic structuralism demands an elucidation of its metaphysical backbone. Here we focus on two theses that stand in need of clarification: (1) the Fundamentality Thesis states that structures are fundamental, and (2) the Priority Thesis states that these structures are prior to putative fundamental objects, if these exist. Candidate notions to illuminate (1) and (2) such as supervenience and ontological dependence failed at this task. Our purpose is to show that grounding is the best competitor to articulate (1) and (2), and regiment such theses in a desirable unified way. Our strategy is two-fold. First, we make the case that grounding does better than ontological dependence and supervenience. Second, we show that the distinction between partial and full grounds permits us to respond to an objection raised by Kerry McKenzie against the proposal of interpreting priority-based Ontic Structuralism in the idiom of metaphysical determination. Our conclusion is that priority ontic structuralists have compelling reasons for adopting a grounding-based approach.
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Notes
Each of these formal features has been challenged. We will not attempt to settle the question of whether grounding is formally unitary. For example, Jenkins (2011) challenges irreflexivity. Wilson (2014) calls asymmetry into question. Schaffer (2012) offers a counterexample to the transitivity of grounding. For a more general overview of how different formal properties of grounding can be defended, see Bliss and Priest (2018).
Against the completability of partial grounds, see Leuenberger (2019). For our purposes, it suffices to accept the distinction between partial and full grounds. Whether the completablity principle is false does not concern us for its possible falsity does not undermine the distinction.
French defines Priority OS as ‘Weak Structural Realism’, but it is plausible to identify these two views.
Being ungrounded must not be confused with being zero-grounded. The latter case permits that something is grounded in zero elements. The former, which is our target case, implies that there is no number of elements (not even zero) that grounds which that is ungrounded. For more on the distinction between these two notions, see Fine (2012, pp. 47–48).
Wolff (2012) raises a different objection to supervenience, focused on the link between reduction and supervenience: «for A to reduce to B, A has to supervene on B. For A to supervene on B, there cannot be a change in A without a change in B» (ibid. p. 611). However, the modal force carried by supervenience is too weak to establish such a reduction claim; moreover, counterexamples from physics shows that supervenience does not hold in the case of representations and symmetry groups. Consequently, representations do not reduce to symmetry groups.
This schema expresses a form of modal-existential dependence (Lowe 1994). However, other interpretations of dependence have been formulated. Among them, we can find essential dependence (Fine1994, 1995) and identity dependence (Lowe 1994; Tahko and Lowe 2015). For a more comprehensive analysis of the varieties of dependence, see Tahko and Lowe (2015) and Koslicki (2012).
Here talk of fundamental kinds is not to be understood in terms of these kinds being ungrounded. Rather it is best regarded as pointing out the most basic kinds that we find at the fundamental level and that constitute the less basic ones.
Maybe r belongs to the category of activities or processes if these are indeed irreducible to either objects or structures.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank several friends and colleagues for help with this project: María Pía Méndez Mateluna, Massimiliano Parenti, Francesca Bellazzi, María J. Ferreira Ruiz, Vincent Lam, Andrea Sereni, Tuomas Thako, Luca Zanetti, and audiences—both real and virtual—at the Ernst Mach Workshop IX, the IUSS work-in-progress seminar, the MetaScience reading group, and the 8es Rencontres doctorales internationales en philosophie des sciences.
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Bianchi, S., Giannotti, J. Grounding ontic structuralism. Synthese 199, 5205–5223 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03001-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03001-7