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.
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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A number of ideas put forward in Sect.��5 of this article should be credited to an unpublished talk by Stephan Leuenberger: ���Emergence and Failures of Supplementation���.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A number of ideas put forward in Sect.��5 of this article should be credited to an unpublished talk by Stephan Leuenberger: ���Emergence and Failures of Supplementation���.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
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.
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).
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).
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.
Kit Fine, Alex Jackson, and Benj Hellie initially pressed this concern against my view.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, Schaffer (2010) supposes that priority relations require a fundamental base.
For example, a reductionist about numbers can say that numbers are theoretically regimented representations of outcomes of tallying activities.
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.
As Van Gulick (2001) remarks, “The basic idea of reduction is conveyed by the ‘nothing more than …’ slogan” (2).
See Post (1987, 227–228) for further arguments to the effect that inter-level explanation is not transitive.
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).
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).
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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.
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Wilson, J.M. Grounding-Based Formulations of Physicalism. Topoi 37, 495–512 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9435-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9435-7