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  1. Explanatory Distance.Elanor Taylor - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1).
    When a train operator tells us that our train will be late ‘because of delays’, their attempt at explanation fails because there is insufficient distance between the explanans and the explanandum. In this paper, I motivate and defend an account of ‘explanatory distance’, based on the idea that explanations give information about dependence. I show that this account offers useful resources for addressing problem cases, including recent debates about grounding explanation, and the historical case of Molière’s dormitive virtue.
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  • Some Spanners in the Works of Grounding Mechanisms Removed.Robin Stenwall - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (2):293-310.
    In this paper I address two concerns with Kelly Trogdon’s grounding mechanism view, i.e. the idea that metaphysical explanation can be modeled on causal-mechanical explanation. The first concern threatens to undermine the unity that grounding-mechanical explanations imposes on metaphysical explanation; and the second concern requires the grounding mechanic to put forth a formal condition on grounding-mechanical models. After having discussed both of these, I provide a solution to the first and argue that the second concern is unwarranted.
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  • Grounding Functionalism and Explanatory Unificationism.Alexios Stamatiadis-bréhier - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-21.
    In this essay, I propose a functionalist theory of grounding (functionalist-grounding). Specifically, I argue that grounding is a second-order phenomenon that is realized by relations that play the noncausal explanatoriness role. I also show that functionalist-grounding can deal with a powerful challenge. Appeals to explanatory unificationism have been made to argue that the success of noncausal explanations does not depend on the existence of grounding relations. Against this, I argue that a systematization involving functionalist-grounding is superior to its anti-relational counterpart.
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  • Mind-Dependence in Berkeley and the Problem of Perception.Umrao Sethi - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4):648-668.
    ABSTRACT On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas—entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of inhering in it, but in virtue of being perceived by it. This metaphysical insight, once correctly understood, gives us the resources to (...)
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  • Disjunction and the Logic of Grounding.Giovanni Merlo - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):567-587.
    Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea of using the logical form of a true sentence as a guide to the metaphysical grounds of the fact stated by that sentence. This paper looks at a particular instance of that idea: the widely accepted principle that disjunctions are grounded in their true disjuncts. I will argue that an unrestricted version of this principle has several problematic consequences and that it’s not obvious how the principle might be restricted in order to (...)
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  • The Cost of Closure: Logical Realism, Anti-Exceptionalism, and Theoretical Equivalence.Michaela M. McSweeney - 2021 - Synthese 199:12795–12817.
    Philosophers of science often assume that logically equivalent theories are theoretically equivalent. I argue that two theses, anti-exceptionalism about logic (which says, roughly, that logic is not a priori, that it is revisable, and that it is not special or set apart from other human inquiry) and logical realism (which says, roughly, that differences in logic reflect genuine metaphysical differences in the world), make trouble for both this commitment and the closely related commitment to theories being closed under logical consequence. (...)
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  • There Is No Distinctively Semantic Circularity Objection to Humean Laws.David Mark Kovacs - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):270-281.
    Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circularity objection has been offered, which seeks to avoid reading such assumptions into the Humean view. This paper argues that the new (...)
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  • The oldest solution to the circularity problem for Humeanism about the laws of nature.David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):1-21.
    According to Humeanism about the laws, the laws of nature are nothing over and above certain kinds of regularities about particular facts. Humeanism has often been accused of circularity: according to scientific practice laws often explain their instances, but on the Humean view they also reduce to the mosaic, which includes those instances. In this paper I formulate the circularity problem in a way that avoids a number of controversial assumptions routinely taken for granted in the literature, and against which (...)
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  • Formal explanations as logical derivations.Francesco A. Genco - 2021 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 31 (3-4):279-342.
    According to a longstanding philosophical tradition dating back to Aristotle, certain proofs do not only certify the truth of their conclusion but also explain it. Lately, much effort is being devo...
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  • Grounding, Quantifiers, and Paradoxes.Francesco A. Genco, Francesca Poggiolesi & Lorenzo Rossi - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (6):1417-1448.
    The notion of grounding is usually conceived as an objective and explanatory relation. It connects two relata if one—the ground—determines or explains the other—the consequence. In the contemporary literature on grounding, much effort has been devoted to logically characterize the formal aspects of grounding, but a major hard problem remains: defining suitable grounding principles for universal and existential formulae. Indeed, several grounding principles for quantified formulae have been proposed, but all of them are exposed to paradoxes in some very natural (...)
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  • Metaphysical grounding.Ricki Bliss & Kelly Trogdon - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    General discussion of grounding, including its formal features, relations to other notions, and applications. (Originally published 2014; revised 2021).
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