Abstract
This paper concerns a distinction between circumstantial truths that hold because of the circumstances and acircumstantial truths that hold regardless of, or transcend, the circumstances. Previous discussions of the distinction tended to focus on its applications, such as to modality, logical truth, and essence. This paper focuses on developing the distinction largely, but not entirely, in abstraction from its potential applications. As such, the paper’s main contribution is to further clarify the distinction itself. An indirect contribution is to help guide its future applications.
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Notes
My discussion owes much to Fine (2005), but with some departures. For one, I emphasize Fine’s intended substance sortal reading of ‘is a man’ and avoid its gendered connotations by using ‘is a human’ (which must not be read as the worldly predicate ‘is an existent human’, cf. Fine (2005: 337) and Wetzel (2000)). I also do not engage with Fine discussions of three grades of necessity.
I follow Kripke (1972) in distinguishing these notions.
Arguably because there may also be a sense in which ‘Elon tweets or not’ is acircumstantial. The issue was raised above and is discussed in Raven (2020a).
Another approach assimilates the basal distinction to inner/outer truth (Adams 1981; Einheuser 2012; Fine 1985). A proposition is an outer truth if it represents a world as it is even if it does not exist in that world, whereas an inner truth both represents a world as it is and exists in it too. But not all unworldly truths are outer truths. For example, the proposition that 0 = 0 is an unworldly truth while also being an inner truth because it exists and represents the actual world as it is.
This follows from the principle that a complex statement is worldly if it has a worldly constituent (cf. Truth-functional Proximal in Sect. 4.2).
So the case is also a counterexample to a closure principle requiring any complex statement composed of only autonomous statements to be autonomous.
Autonomy and unworldliness also diverge over zero-grounded statements. These are not autonomous because grounded, but are also presumably unworldly.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this.
Non-ultimate autonomy is the vacuous case where that fact itself is inapt for ground.
I assume the predicate must be simple. This avoids distracting complications that arise if the predicate can be complex. They may be postponed for another occasion.
Differential applicability is also briefly discussed by Kuhn (2020: fn. 6).
Kuhn (2020: fn. 6) suspects otherwise. But I conjecture that his suspicions derive from his choice of example. His examples are ‘four is smaller than five’ and ‘David is smaller than Goliath’. It is implausible that ‘is smaller than’ is being used in the same sense in both sentences. But it is less so for ‘is round’ in my examples.
These define proximal basal status in terms of circumstantial and acircumstantial truth. This is not circular because the latter notions are left undefined.
Perhaps the most obvious characterization is that a predicate P is proximally (un)worldly just in case P’s applications are uniformly (un)worldly.
This is even more natural if operators are what third-order quantifiers range over.
Fine (2021) uses this “dominant vs. recessive” terminology in another context.
Kuhn (2020) also makes this assumption. The assumption may seem to conflict with Muñoz’s (2019) view that negative existentials are zero-grounded. Given that ‘There are dogs’ is a worldly truth, the assumption entails that its negation ‘There are no dogs’ is too. But if this negative existential is zero-grounded, then it may seem to be unworldly after all. The conflict may be avoided, however, with the proximal/distal distinction. For we may say that ‘There are no dogs’ is proximally worldly even if its being zero-grounded makes it distally unworldly.
Kuhn (2020) also assumes the absolutist approach.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the cases discussed in the rest of this section.
I take left to apply to both C1 and C2, giving “full weight” to C1 alone. Another operator first operates on just C1, ignoring C2 entirely. If first genuinely differs from left, then it is best regarded as a one-place operator applying (redundantly) to C1. The basal status of first(C1) is then that of C1 itself.
As we will soon see, this is compatible with W ∨ U being distally unworldly.
An alternative takes the quantifier to be a property of properties and relies on λ-abstraction to bind variables. I set aside this alternative for another occasion.
But it can be both: the constituents A,B of A ∧ B may also be its grounds.
For instance, one weaker variation is that each of G0,… must lack the contrary hereditary or weakly terminal basal status.
The “distal” notions in those papers correspond to the weakly terminal notions here.
This may have an essentialist explanation, e.g. it lies in the nature of the predicate to have uniformly (un)worldly applications. I do not assume any such explanation.
Thanks to Troy Cross, Kit Fine, Martin Glazier, Dana Goswick, Paul Hovda, David Mark Kovacs, Jon Litland, Kristie Miller, Alec Oakley, Erica Shumener, Jennifer Wang, and anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.
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Raven, M.J. The bases of truths. Philos Stud 180, 2153–2174 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01965-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01965-z