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Real Definition

Analytic Philosophy 56 (3):189-209 (2015)

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  1. Ground by Status.Lisa Vogt - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (2):419-432.
    What is the explanatory role of ‘status-truths’ such as essence-truths, necessity-truths and law-truths? A plausible principle, suggested by various authors, is Ground by Status, according to which status truths ground their prejacents. For instance, if it is essential to a that p, then this grounds the fact that p. But Ground by Status faces a forceful objection: it is inconsistent with widely accepted principles regarding the logic of grounding (Glazier in Philos Stud 174(11):2871–2889, 2017a, Synthese 174(198):1409–1424, 2017b; Kappes in Synthese (...)
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  • Normative realism and Brentanian accounts of fittingness.Reuben Sass - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-25.
    Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that fittingness is part of the analysis of normativity. Since the argument rests on an analogy between truth and fittingness, its impact may seem limited by the idiosyncratic features of Brentano’s later notion of truth. (...)
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  • Standing up for supervenience.Bart Streumer - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):138-154.
    There is a well‐known argument against irreducibly normative properties that appeals to the following claim about supervenience: for all possible worlds W and W*, if the instantiation of descriptive properties in W and W* is exactly the same, then the instantiation of normative properties in W and W* is also exactly the same. This claim used to be uncontroversial, but recently several philosophers have challenged it. Do these challenges undermine this argument? I argue that they do not, since the negation (...)
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  • Essence and Thisness.Sungil Han - 2023 - In Dean Zimmerman & Karen Bennett (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Vol. 13. Oxford University Press.
    The project of grounding necessity in essence often goes together with the model of essence that assimilates the constitutive essence of an object to the definition of it. The paper argues that if the grounding project is to succeed, the definitional model must be questioned. Like any object whatever, a concrete individual is necessarily identical to that individual. It is argued that this necessity can have an essential ground only if the primitive identity property of it or its thisness is (...)
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  • A Conversation on Grounding.Mark Wilson & Chris Daly - 2023 - The Monist 106 (3):317-325.
    Concerning a conversation about grounding between Philo, a quizzical maverick, and Cleanthes, a studious devotee of the very latest trends in metaphysics. Whereas Cleanthes enthuses about grounding, Philo counsels methodological caution and greater immersion in actual scientific practice.
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  • The Taming of the Grounds.Noël Blas Saenz - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (8):789-809.
    As it is presently employed, grounding permits grounding many things from one ground. In this paper, I show why this is a mistake by pushing for a uniqueness principle on grounding. After arguing in favor of this principle, I say something about it and kinds of grounding, discuss a similar principle, and consider its import on a formal feature of grounding, ontology, and ontological simplicity.
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  • Everything First.Errol Lord - 2023 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 97 (1):248-272.
    Normative theory aims to understand the commonalities between ethics, prudence, epistemology, aesthetics and political philosophy (among others). One central question in normative theory is what is fundamental to the normative. The reasons-first approach holds that normative reasons are fundamental to the normative domain. This view has been challenged by proponents of alternative X-first views such as value, fittingness and ought. This paper examines the debate about the analysis of normative reasons and argues for a new form of reductive naturalism that (...)
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  • Attitudes and the Normativity of Fittingness.Conor McHugh - 2023 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 97 (1):273-293.
    What is the structure of normative reality? According to X First, normativity has a monistic foundationalist structure: there is a unique normatively basic property in terms of which all the other normative properties are analysed. The main aim of this paper is to defend the view that fittingness—the property that an attitude has when it gets things right with respect to its object, as when you admire the admirable or desire the desirable—is first, or perhaps joint first. I will focus (...)
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  • Critical social ontology.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...)
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  • Attention and Attentiveness: A defence of the argument for adverbialism.Christopher Mole - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (2):465-480.
    In recent philosophical work on attention, several authors have employed versions of an argument purporting to show that attention is not identical to any cognitive process. Others have criticised this argument. The present article addresses those various criticisms, and shows the original argument to be a valid one. It also shows that this argument cannot be resisted by taking attention to be a disjunction of several processes, by taking it be a genus of process that is composed of various species, (...)
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  • Derivative Indeterminacy.Kevin Richardson - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.
    Indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) if it has its source in the way the world is (rather than how it is represented or known). There are two questions we could ask about indeterminacy. First: does it exist? Second: is indeterminacy derivative? I focus on the second question. Specifically, I argue that (at least some) metaphysical indeterminacy can be derivative, where this roughly means that facts about indeterminacy are metaphysically grounded in facts about what is determinate.
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  • The Stuff That Matters.N. G. Laskowski - 2024 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies of Metaethics 19. Oxford University Press USA.
    On one way of talking about a traditional metaethical topic, realists accept that some items appear on the list of what exists in the moral or more broadly normative domain of inquiry. They then divide over whether those items are like what science and experience suggest that all other items on the list of what exists across all domains are like – naturalistic and secular. Reductive naturalists answer this further question affirmatively. Why don’t nonnaturalists? I explore the answer that it’s (...)
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  • Identity Physicalism vs Ground Physicalism about Consciousness.Adam Pautz - forthcoming - In G. Rabin (ed.), Grounding and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge raft of special, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ground, Essence, and the Metaphysics of Metanormative Non-Naturalism.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (26):674-701.
    The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the distinctive metaphysical commitments of non-naturalism in terms of metaphysical grounding and essence. We (...)
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  • Why Lewis Would Have Rejected Grounding.Fraser MacBride & Frederique Janssen-Lauret - 2022 - In Helen Beebee & A. R. J. Fisher (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 66-91.
    We argue that Lewis would have rejected recent appeals to the notions of ‘metaphysical dependency’, ‘grounding’ and ‘ontological priority’, because he would have held that they’re not needed and they’re not intelligible. We argue our case by drawing upon Lewis’s views on supervenience, the metaphysics of singletons and the dubiousness of Kripke’s essentialism.
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  • Social construction and indeterminacy.Kevin Richardson - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (1):37-52.
    An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in (...)
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  • Women Are Not Adult Human Females.Rebecca Mason - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1):180-191.
    1 Some philosophers defend the thesis that women are adult human females. Call this the adult human female thesis (AHF). There are two versions of this thesis—one modal and one definitional. Accord...
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  • Essence, Triviality, and Fundamentality.Ashley Coates - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):502-516.
    I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence, and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory provides a promising way forward for attempts to produce an adequate nonprimitivist, modalist account of essence. As both triviality and fundamentality in the account are (...)
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  • Solving a puzzle of definition.Jonas Werner - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper concerns the question of which logical principles hold for real definitions. Recently, Samuel Elgin has presented five principles concerning real definitions that seem initially plausible. He has shown them to be jointly inconsistent. This gives rise to a puzzle that can only be solved by denying one of the principles. In this paper, I argue against Elgin's principle of expansion, which concerns substituting a definiens for its definiendum within the definiens of a further definition. I show that this (...)
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  • Immanence in Abundance.Chad Carmichael - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (4):1535-1553.
    In this paper, I develop a theory on which each of a thing’s abundant properties is immanent in that thing. On the version of the theory I will propose, universals are abundant, each instantiated universal is immanent, and each uninstantiated universal is such that it could have been instantiated, in which case it would have been immanent. After setting out the theory, I will defend it from David Lewis’s argument that such a combination of immanence and abundance is absurd. I (...)
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  • Sensible individuation.Umrao Sethi - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1):168-191.
    There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically flexible” kinds. That is, their real definitions allow for both physical objects and mental entities to be colored or shaped. (...)
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  • Collective Abstraction.Jon Erling Litland - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (4):453-497.
    This paper develops a novel theory of abstraction—what we call collective abstraction. The theory solves a notorious problem for noneliminative structuralism. The noneliminative structuralist holds that in addition to various isomorphic systems there is a pure structure that can be abstracted from each of these systems; but existing accounts of abstraction fail for nonrigid systems like the complex numbers. The problem with the existing accounts is that they attempt to define a unique abstraction operation. The theory of collective abstraction instead (...)
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  • Grounding and defining identity.Jon Erling Litland - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):850-876.
    I systematically defend a novel account of the grounds for identity and distinctness facts: they are all uniquely zero‐grounded. First, this Null Account is shown to avoid a range of problems facing other accounts: a relation satisfying the Null Account would be an excellent candidate for being the identity relation. Second, a plenitudinist view of relations suggests that there is such a relation. To flesh out this plenitudinist view I sketch a novel framework for expressing real definitions, use this framework (...)
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  • How to Choose Normative Concepts.Ting Cho Lau - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (2):145-161.
    Matti Eklund (2017) has argued that ardent realists face a serious dilemma. Ardent realists believe that there is a mind-independent fact as to which normative concepts we are to use. Eklund claims that the ardent realist cannot explain why this is so without plumping in favor of their own normative concepts or changing the topic. The paper first advances the discussion by clarifying two ways of understanding the question of which normative concepts to choose: a theoretical question about which concepts (...)
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  • Searching for social properties.Dee Payton - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):741-754.
    What does it take for a property to be a social property? This question is different from questions about what it takes for a property to be socially constructed. That is: it is one thing to be social, it is another to be socially constructed. Compared to questions about social construction, this question about sociality has received relatively little attention in social metaphysics. Here, I work from a very specific set of observations which arise from the social metaphysics literature to (...)
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  • What Is Punishment?Frej Klem Thomsen - manuscript
    Since the middle of the 20th century, philosophers and legal scholars have debated the precise definition of punishment. This chapter surveys the debate, identifies six potential conditions of punishment, and critically reviews each of them: 1) the response condition, which holds that punishment must be in response to wrongdoing, 2) the culpability condition, which holds that punishment must be of a person morally responsible for wrongdoing, 3) the authority condition, which holds that punishment must be imposed by a relevant authority, (...)
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  • Definition.Samuel Elgin - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (9):3019-3036.
    This paper presents a puzzle about the logic of real definition. I demonstrate that five principles concerning definition—that it is coextensional and irreflexive, that it applies to its cases, that it permits expansion, and that it is itself defined—are logically incompatible. I then explore the advantages and disadvantages of each principle—one of which must be rejected to restore consistency.
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  • Causal fundamentality.Soufiane Hamri - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-13.
    I present an argument for causal fundamentality, understood as the thesis that the causal history of every being, whose existence has a causal explanation, includes some uncaused beings. I argue that this thesis is a consequence of an actualist account of metaphysical modality whose novelty lies in its hybrid dispositional-essentialist foundation. I argue that my modal theory is extensionally correct and minimalistic. Its range of metaphysical necessities and possibilities is just as wide as needed to capture the pre-theoretical notion of (...)
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  • Nomic moral naturalness.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-22.
    Moral realists often disagree about the nature of moral properties. These properties can be natural (as per naturalistic moral realism) or non-natural. But it is unclear how we should understand the notion of naturalness employed in these discussions. In this paper I propose a novel account of moral naturalness. I suggest that a property F is natural iff F falls within the scope of a natural law. In turn, a law is natural when it figures in a nomic nexus involving (...)
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  • On the Reduction of Constitutive to Consequential Essence.Taylor-Grey Miller - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (55).
    Fine has introduced an important distinction between constitutive and consequential essence. The constitutive essence of an object comprises truths directly definitive of the object whereas the consequential essence comprises the class of truths following logically from the directly definitive truths (subject to certain constraints). Essence theorists then face a challenge: how shall we draw the line between the truths directly definitive of an object and those that are mere consequences of them? Fine offers an answer. We start with the object’s (...)
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  • (1 other version)Physicalism and the Identity of Identity Theories.Samuel Z. Elgin - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):161-180.
    It is often said that there are two varieties of identity theory. Type-identity theorists interpret physicalism as the claim that every property is identical to a physical property, while token-identity theorists interpret it as the claim that every particular is identical to a physical particular. The aim of this paper is to undermine the distinction between the two. Drawing on recent work connecting generalized identity to truth-maker semantics, I demonstrate that these interpretations are logically equivalent. I then argue that each (...)
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  • Possibility Precedes Actuality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3583-3603.
    This paper is inspired by and develops on E. J. Lowe’s work, who writes in his book The Possibility of Metaphysics that ‘metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality’ (1998: 9). Metaphysics deals with possibilities – metaphysical possibilities – but is not able to determine what is actual without the help of empirical research. Accordingly, a delimitation of the space of possibilities is required. The resulting – controversial – picture is that we generally need to know whether something is (...)
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  • Definition: A practical guide to constructing and evaluating definitions of terms.David Hitchcock - 2021 - Windsor, ON: Windsor Studies in Argumentation.
    This book proposes guidelines for constructing and evaluating definitions of terms, i.e. words or phrases of general application. The guidelines extend to adoption of nomenclature. The book is meant to be a practical guide for people who find themselves in their daily lives or their employment producing or evaluating definitions of terms. It can be consulted rather than being read through. The book’s theoretical framework is a distinction, due to Robert H. Ennis, of three dimensions of definitions: the act of (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Moral Parody Argument Against Panpsychism.Zach Blaesi - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):1821–1852.
    I exploit parallel considerations in the philosophy of mind and metaethics to argue that the reasoning employed in an important argument for panpsychism overgeneralizes to support an analogous position in metaethics: panmoralism. Next, I raise a number of problems for panmoralism and thereby build a case for taking the metaethical parallel to be a reductio ad absurdum of the argument for panpsychism. Finally, I contrast panmoralism with a position recently defended by Einar Duenger Bohn and argue that the two suffer (...)
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  • Definition by Proxy.Samuel Elgin - manuscript
    I take some initial steps toward a theory of real definition, drawing upon recent developments in higher-order logic. The resulting account allows for extremely fine- grained distinctions (i.e., it can distinguish between any relata that differ in their syntactic structure, while avoiding the Russell-Myhill problem). It is the first account that can consistently embrace three desirable logical principles that initially appear to be incompatible: the Identification Hypothesis (if F is, by definition, G then F is the same as G), Irreflexivity (...)
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  • Explaining Normative Reasons.Daniel Fogal & Olle Risberg - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):51-80.
    In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Epistemology of Modality.Antonella Mallozzi, Michael Wallner & Anand Vaidya - 2021 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Living without microphysical supervenience.Alex Moran - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):405-428.
    The Doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience states that microphysical duplicates cannot differ in their intrinsic properties. According to Merricks :59–71, 1998a, Objects and persons, Oxford University Press, 2001), however, this thesis is false, since microphysical duplicates can differ with respect to the intrinsic property of consciousness. In my view, Merricks’ argument is plausible, and extant attempts to reject it are problematic. However, the argument also threatens to make consciousness appear mysterious, by implying that consciousness facts fail to be microphysically determined and (...)
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  • Metaphysically Opaque Grounding.Henrik Rydéhn - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (7):729-745.
    This article explores the concept of metaphysically opaque grounding, a largely neglected form of metaphysical grounding that challenges the commonly held assumptions that grounding is an especially intimate and powerful connection between facts and that it is necessarily connected with the essences of things. I provide a definition of opaque grounding, identify some interesting philosophical views that are committed to it, and explore some consequences for the general theory of grounding. Finally, I briefly address some natural initial doubts about opaque (...)
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  • Social kinds are essentially mind-dependent.Rebecca Mason - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3975-3994.
    I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...)
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  • What Cancer Is.J. James Frost - unknown
    The problem of cancer is examined from the metaphysical standpoint of essence and ground. An essentialist definition of cancer is assumed that would be valid in all possible worlds in which cancer could logically exist. The grounds of cancer are then examined and elucidated. Two grounding cancer properties are identified and discussed: symmetry- breaking and computational intelligence. Each examination leads to concrete conclusions for novel therapeutic approaches and a more fundamental understanding of what cancer is at bottom. Other possible cancer (...)
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  • Definition.Samuel Elgin - manuscript
    This paper presents a puzzle about the logic of real definition. In particular, I demonstrate that five principles concerning definition (that it is coextensional and irreflexive, that it applies to its cases, that it permits expansion and that it is itself defined) are incompatible. I then explore the advantages and disadvantages of each principle—one of which must be rejected to restore consistency.
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  • Properties.Francesco Orilia & Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    2020 update of the entry "Properties".
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  • Pretense, Cancellation, and the Act Theory of Propositions.Manuel García-Carpintero - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...)
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  • Essence, Potentiality, and Modality.Barbara Vetter - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):833-861.
    According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations (...)
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  • How to Achieve the Physicalist Dream Theory of Consciousness: Identity or Grounding? (2020).Adam Pautz - forthcoming - In G. Rabin (ed.), Grounding and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge raft of special, (...)
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  • The puzzle of the laws of appearance.Adam Pautz - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):257-272.
    In this paper I will present a puzzle about visual appearance. There are certain necessary constraints on how things can visually appear. The puzzle is about how to explain them. I have no satisfying solution. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is a puzzle. I will develop the puzzle as it arises for representationalism about experience because it is currently the most popular theory of experience and I think it is along the right lines. However, everyone faces a (...)
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  • Are women adult human females?Alex Byrne - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (12):3783-3803.
    Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...)
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  • Grounding and metametaphysics.Alexander Skiles & Kelly Trogdon - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.
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  • Grounding is necessary and contingent.Kevin Richardson - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (4):453-480.
    It is common to think that grounding is necessary in the sense that: if P grounds Q, then necessarily: if P, then Q. Though most accept this principle, some give counterexamples to it. Instead of straightforwardly arguing for, or against, necessity, I explain the sense in which grounding is necessary and contingent. I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: what-grounding and why-grounding, where the former kind is necessary while the latter is contingent.
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