Skip to main content
Log in

Grounding-Based Formulations of Physicalism

  • Published:
Topoi Aims and scope Submit manuscript

A Correction to this article was published on 28 February 2019

This article has been updated

Abstract

I problematize Grounding-based formulations of physicalism. More specifically, I argue, first, that motivations for adopting a Grounding-based formulation of physicalism are unsound; second, that a Grounding-based formulation lacks illuminating content, and that attempts to imbue Grounding with content by taking it to be a (non-monotonic, hyperintensional) strict partial order are unuseful (since ‘over and above’ relations such as strong emergence may also be non-monotonic hyperintensional strict partial orders) and problematic (in ruling out reductive versions of physicalism, and relatedly, in undermining the ostensive definition of primitive Grounding as operative in any context where idioms of dependence are at issue); third, that conceptions of Grounding as constitutively connected to metaphysical explanation conflate metaphysics and epistemology, are ultimately either circular or self-undermining, and controversially assume that physical dependence is incompatible with explanatory gaps; fourth, that in order to appropriately distinguish physicalism from strong emergentism (physicalism’s primary rival), a Grounding-based formulation must introduce one and likely two primitives in addition to Grounding; and fifth, that understanding physical dependence in terms of Grounding gives rise to ‘spandrel’ questions, including, e.g., “What Grounds Grounding?”, which arise only due to the overly abstract nature of Grounding.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

  • 28 February 2019

    A number of ideas put forward in Sect.��5 of this article should be credited to an unpublished talk by Stephan Leuenberger: ���Emergence and Failures of Supplementation���.

  • 28 February 2019

    A number of ideas put forward in Sect.��5 of this article should be credited to an unpublished talk by Stephan Leuenberger: ���Emergence and Failures of Supplementation���.

Notes

  1. Note that, perhaps misleadingly, the ‘nothing over and above’ locution is standardly used as compatible with dependent goings-on being distinct from lower-level goings-on—i.e., as compatible with non-reductive as well as reductive (identity-based) versions of physicalism.

  2. See Melnyk (2016) and Blaesi (in progress) for consonant but different critical discussions of Grounding-based formulations of physicalism, according to which Grounding fails to ensure nothing-over-and-aboveness (Melnyk) and fails to close explanatory gaps (Blaesi).

  3. More specifically: among the specific metaphysical relations offered as characterizing (one or other variety of) physical dependence are type identity (Place 1956; Armstrong 1968/1993), type identity coupled with functional role reference-fixing (Lewis 1966; Armstrong 1968/1993), type identity involving a disjunction of lower-level types (Antony and Levine 1997), species-specific type identity (Kim 1992), type distinctness with token identity (Macdonald and Macdonald 1995; Ehring 1996; Robb 1997), functional realization (Putnam 1967; Shoemaker 1975; Melnyk 2003), the classical mereological part-whole relation (Shoemaker 2000/2001, Clapp 2001), mechanistic or causal varieties of composition (Searle 1992; Craver 2001; Gillett 2002), the constitution relation (Baker 1993), the determinable/determinate relation (MacDonald and MacDonald 1986; Yablo 1992; Wilson 2009), and the proper subset relation understood as holding between powers of higher- and lower-level goings-on (Wilson 1999; Clarke 1999; Shoemaker 2000/2001, Clapp 2001).

  4. An anonymous referee suggested a third strategy, according to which, notwithstanding that Grounding is not needed to fill any specific role relevant to investigating metaphysical dependence, nonetheless it is the only notion or relation capable of playing all the relevant roles. I won’t treat this nice suggestion here, since as I’ve argued elsewhere (Wilson 2014), Grounding is not able to play many of the roles that the small-g relations are able to play, by way of providing sufficiently articulate illumination into metaphysical dependence.

  5. Kit Fine, Alex Jackson, and Benj Hellie initially pressed this concern against my view.

  6. Or relatively fundamental, if the world is gunky. The possibility of gunky worlds poses no barrier to characterizing physicalism; see Montero (2006) and Wilson (forthcoming b) for discussion.

  7. See, e.g., the description of ‘discriminatory’ metaphysical investigations in Jackson (1998), as starting with a specification of the presumed fundamental base, and then attempting to ‘locate’ the rest of the relevant goings-on in this base.

  8. Indeed, Grounding is often characterized as a primitive relation or notion of relative fundamentality; hence Cameron’s argument presupposes that I endorse Grounding or a close cousin thereof, which I don’t.

  9. Indeed, Schaffer (2010) supposes that priority relations require a fundamental base.

  10. For example, a reductionist about numbers can say that numbers are theoretically regimented representations of outcomes of tallying activities.

  11. Even those seeming to endorse supervenience as sufficient unto characterizing physicalist dependence (e.g., Chalmers 1996) typically supplement this notion (in Chalmers’s case, with conceptual entailment) in order to address at least some salient counterexamples.

  12. See also Jenkins (2011), Bliss (2011), Thompson (2016), Barnes (forthcoming), Rodriguez-Pereyra (forthcoming), and others.

  13. As Van Gulick (2001) remarks, “The basic idea of reduction is conveyed by the ‘nothing more than …’ slogan” (2).

  14. See Post (1987, 227–228) for further arguments to the effect that inter-level explanation is not transitive.

  15. Here the contrast is with non-fundamental novelty, reflecting merely aggregative relational or other combinatorial novelty, of the sort that physicalists can happily accept. The schematic understanding of strong emergence as combining fundamentality and dependence is historically longstanding, originating (at least) with the British Emergentists, including Mill (1843/1973) and Broad (1925); more generally, it is (modulo recent failed attempts to characterize emergence as involving merely nomological supervenience) the starting point of investigations into such emergence, with the focus being on how to make sense of this combination of features, in terms of fundamental powers, properties, interactions, or laws (see, e.g., McLaughlin 1992; O’Connor and Wong 2005; Wilson 2002; Barnes 2012).

  16. As Yablo (1992) puts it, “To caricature emergentism just slightly, [this involves] a kind of “supercausation” which improves on the original in that supercauses act immediately and metaphysically guarantee their supereffects” (256–257).

References

  • Antony LM, Levine JM (1997) Reduction with autonomy. Philos Perspect 11:83–105

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong DM (1968/1993) A materialist theory of the mind, 2nd edn. Routledge, London

  • Audi P (2012) Grounding: toward a theory of the in-virtue-of relation. J Philos 109:685–711

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baker LR (1993) Metaphysics and mental causation. In: Heil J, Mele A (eds) Mental causation. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 75–96

    Google Scholar 

  • Barnes E (2012) Emergence and fundamentality. Mind 121:873–901

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barnes E (forthcoming). Symmetric dependence. In: Bliss R, Priest G (eds) Reality and its structure. Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • Batterman R (1998) Why equilibrium statistical mechanics works: Universality and the Renormalization Group. Philos Sci 65:183–208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bennett K (2011) By our bootstraps. Philos Perspect 25:27–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berker S (in progress) The unity of grounding

  • Blaesi Z (in progress) Grounding, physicalism, and the explanatory gap

  • Bliss R (2011) Against metaphysical foundationalism. Ph.D. thesis

  • Bliss R, Trogdon K (2014) Metaphysical grounding. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy

  • Boyd R (1980) Materialism without reduction: what physicalism does not entail. In: Block N (ed) Readings in the philosophy of psychology, vol 1. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 67–106

    Google Scholar 

  • Brentano F (1874) Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Broad CD (1925) Mind and its place in nature. Kegan Paul, Cambridge (From the 1923 Tanner Lectures at Cambridge)

  • Cameron RP (2016) Do we need grounding? Inquiry 59:382–397

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chalmers D (1996) The conscious mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Churchland PM (1981) Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. J Philos 78:67–90

    Google Scholar 

  • Churchland PS (1986) Neurophilosophy: toward a unified science of the mind-brain. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Clapp L (2001) Disjunctive properties: multiple realizations. J Philos 98:111–136

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke R (1999) Nonreductive physicalism and the causal powers of the mental. Synthese 51:295–322

    Google Scholar 

  • Correia F (2005) Existential dependence and cognate notions. Philosophia Verlag, Munich

    Google Scholar 

  • Craver CF (2001) Role functions, mechanisms, and hierarchy. Philos Sci 68:53–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dasgupta S (2014) The possibility of physicalism. J Philos 111:557–592

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • deRosset L (2013) Grounding explanations. Philos Impr 13:1–26

  • Dixon T (2016) Grounding and supplementation. Erkenntnis 81:375–389

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ehring D (1996) Mental causation, determinables, and property instances. Nous 30:461–480

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Field H (1980) Science without numbers. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Fine K (1992) Language and ontology. In: Leinfellner E, Kraemer W, Schank J (eds) Acts, events, and things. Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna, pp 97–105

    Google Scholar 

  • Fine K (2001) The question of realism. Philos Impr 1:1–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Fine K (2012) Guide to ground. In: Correia F, Schnieder B (eds) Metaphysical grounding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 37–80

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillett C (2002) The dimensions of realization: a critique of the standard view. Analysis 62:316–323

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heil J (1992) The nature of true minds. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hofweber T (2009) Ambitious, yet modest, metaphysics. In: Chalmers D, Manley D, Wasserman R (eds) Metametaphysics: new essays on the foundations of ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 260–289

  • Horgan T (1993) From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world. Mind 102:555–586

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson F (1998) From metaphysics to ethics: a defense of conceptual analysis. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Jenkins CS (2011) Is metaphysical dependence irreflexive? The Monist 94:267–276

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim J (1973) Causes and counterfactuals. J Philos 70:570–2

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim J (1984) Concepts of supervenience. Philos Phenomenol Res 45:153–76

    Google Scholar 

  • Kim J (1992) Multiple realization and the metaphysics of reduction. Philos Phenomenol Res 52:1–26 (reprinted)

  • Lewis D (1966) An argument for the identity theory. J Philos 63:17–25 (reprinted)

  • Lewis D (1983) New work for a theory of universals. Aust J Philos 61:343–377

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lycan WG, Pappas GS (1972) What is eliminative materialism? Aust J Philos 50:149–59

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald C, Macdonald GF (eds) (1995) How to be psychologically relevant. In: Philosophy of psychology: Debates on psychological explanation. Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • MacDonald C, MacDonald GF (1986) Mental causes and explanation of action. In: Stevenson L, Squires R, Haldane J (eds) Mind, causation, and action, update. Basil Blackwell, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • McLaughlin B (1992) The rise and fall of British emergentism. In: Beckerman A, Flohr H, Kim J (eds) Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of non-reductive physicalism. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 49–93

    Google Scholar 

  • McLaughlin B, Bennett K (2014) Supervenience. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy

  • Melnyk A (2003) A physicalist manifesto: thoroughly modern materialism. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Melnyk A (2016) Grounding and the formulation of physicalism. In: Aizawa K, Gillett C (eds) Scientific composition and metaphysical ground. Palgrave-Macmillan, London

  • Mill JS (1843/1973) A system of logic, vols II and III of the collected works of John Stuart Mill. University of Toronto Press, Toronto

  • Montero B (2006) Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable world. Erkenntnis 64:177–191

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ney A (forthcoming) Grounding in the philosophy of mind: a defense. In: Aizawa K, Gillett C (eds) Scientific composition and metaphysical ground. Palgrave-Macmillan, London

  • O’Connor T, Wong HY (2005) The metaphysics of emergence. Nous 39:658–678

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perry J (2001) Knowledge, possibility, and consciousness, 2nd edn. The MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Place UT (1956) Is consciousness a brain process? Br J Psychol 47:44–50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Post J (1987) Faces of existence. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam H (1967) The nature of mental states. In: Capitan WH, Merrill DD (eds) Art, mind, and religion. Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, pp 1–223

    Google Scholar 

  • Quine WVO (1951) Two dogmas of empiricism. Philos Rev 60:20–43

  • Raven M (forthcoming) Fundamentality without foundations. Philos Phenomenol Res

  • Raven M (in progress) New work for a theory of ground

  • Robb D (1997) The properties of mental causation. Philos Q 47:178–94

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rodriguez-Pereyra G (forthcoming) Grounding is not a strict order. J Am Philos Assoc

  • Rosen G (2010) Metaphysical dependence: grounding and reduction. In: Hale B, Hoffmann A (eds) Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 109–136

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiffer S (1987) Remnants of meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer J (2009) On what grounds what. In: Chalmers D, Manley D, Wasserman R (eds) Metametaphysics: new essays on the foundations of ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 347–383

  • Schaffer J (2010) Monism: the priority of the whole. Philos Rev 119:31–76

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer J (2012) Grounding, transitivity, and contrastivity. In: Correia F, Schnieder B (eds) Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 122–138

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer J (forthcoming) Ground rules: lessons from Wilson. In: Aizawa K, Gillett C (eds) Scientific composition and metaphysical ground. Palgrave-Macmillan, London

  • Searle JR (1992) The rediscovery of the mind. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker S (1975) Functionalism and qualia. Philos Stud 27:292–315

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker S (2000/2001) Realization and mental causation. In: Proceedings of the 20th world congress in philosophy. Philosophy Documentation Center, Cambridge, pp 23–33 (published in revised form in Gillett C, Loewer B (eds) Physicalism and its discontents, pp 74–98)

  • Sider T (2011) Writing the book of the world. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smart JJC (1958) Sensations and brain processes. Philos Rev 68:141–156

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strevens M (2004) The causal and unification accounts of explanation unified—causally. Nous 38:154–176

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson N (2016) Metaphysical interdependence. In: Jago M (ed) Reality making. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 38–55

  • Thompson N (in progress) Grounding, metaphysical explanation, and the structure of reality

  • Van Gulick R (2001) Reduction, emergence and other recent options on the mind/body problem: a philosophic overview. Synthese 8:1–34

    Google Scholar 

  • Walter S (2006) Determinates, determinables, and causal relevance. Can J Philos 37:217–243

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitehead, AN (1929) Process and reality: an essay in cosmology. Free Press, New York

  • Williamson T (2000) Knowledge and its limits. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (1999) How superduper does a physicalist supervenience need to be? Philos Q 49:33–52

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2002) Causal powers, forces, and superdupervenience. Grazer Philos Stud 63:53–78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2005) Supervenience-based formulations of physicalism. Nous 39:426–59

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2009) Determination, realization, and mental Causation. Philos Stud 145:149–169

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2011a) Much ado about ’something’: critical notice of Chalmers, Manley, Wasserman, metametaphysics. Analysis 71:172–188

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2011b) Non-reductive realization and the powers-based subset strategy. Br J Philos Sci 94:121–154

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2014) No work for a theory of grounding. Inquiry 57:1–45

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (2015) Metaphysical emergence: weak and strong. In: Bigaj T, Wuthrich C (eds) Metaphysical emergence in contemporary physics. Poznan studies in the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities, pp 251–306

  • Wilson JM (2016) The question of metaphysics. Philos Mag 74:90–96

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson JM (forthcoming a) Determinables and determinates. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy

  • Wilson JM (forthcoming b) The unity and priority arguments for Grounding. In: Aizawa K, Gillett C (eds) Scientific composition and metaphysical ground. Palgrave-Macmillan, London

  • Woodward J (1997) Explanation, invariance, and intervention. Philos Sci (Proc) 64:S26–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Worley S (1997) Determination and mental causation. Erkenntnis 46:281–304

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yablo S (1992) Mental causation. Philos Rev 101:245–280

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks for helpful comments to Andreas Elpidorou, Benj Hellie, two anonymous referees, and members of the Epistemology, Language, Logic, Mind, and Meta-physics group at Yale University.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jessica M. Wilson.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wilson, J.M. Grounding-Based Formulations of Physicalism. Topoi 37, 495–512 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9435-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9435-7

Keywords

Navigation