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Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness

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Abstract

In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful.

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Notes

  1. See Fine (2001, 2012a), Correia (2005: Ch. 3), Schaffer (2009), Rosen (2010), and works to be cited later.

  2. In the last few years, many philosophers gave accounts of various phenomena explicitly in terms of grounding. See, among others, Witmer et al. (2005) and Bader (2013) on intrinsicality, Rodriguez-Pereyra (2005) and Schaffer (2010b) on truthmaking, Chudnoff (2011) on knowledge, Whitcomb (2012) on divine omniscience, Sartorio 2013 on free will and moral responsibility, Dasgupta (2014b) on physicalism, Maguire (2015) and Woods (2016) on moral naturalism, and Carmichael (2016) on theories of properties. Examples could be multiplied; the applied grounding literature is already vast and steadily growing.

  3. Cf. Schaffer (2009: 375, 2016), Correia and Schnieder (2012: 2–4), Raven (2012: 692–693), and Berker (2016).

  4. You might be just a conservative for resisting the revolution, but if you fight it after its triumph, you probably deserve to be called a reactionary.

  5. See also Bennett (2011) and forthcoming for a related view.

  6. See Fine (2001, 2012a), Correia (2010, 2014), and Litland forthcoming for the connective view, Rosen (2010), Audi (2012a, b), Raven (2012), and Skiles (2015) for the relational view, and Rodriguez-Pereyra (2005), R. Cameron (2008), and Schaffer (2009) for the category-neutral view.

  7. Although both Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma and many of Aristotle’s works are concerned with notions of dependence and priority, and perhaps some of these notions are explanatory in some sense, it’s anachronistic to assume that they match any contemporary notion of grounding. ‘Grounding’, as used today, presupposes certain conceptual distinctions (e.g. between causal and non-causal explanation) that Plato and Aristotle didn’t make. Some Plato scholars, like Evans (2012), do construe the Euthryphro dilemma in terms of grounding, but this reading is far from mandatory. Judson (2010), for instance, argues that though Plato did rely on some notion of dependence in setting out the dilemma, he was not clear in his mind about what that notion was. For a thorough discussion of Aristotle’s various notions of priority, see Peramatzis (2011).

    There is also little reason to think that contemporary philosophers recognized grounding before Fine’s work. Pace Schaffer (2009: 363–4), for example, Lewis has never subscribed to a supervenience analysis of grounding; rather, he proposed to replace priority-talk with supervenience-talk (1983: 358). Poland (1994) and Loewer (2001), too, are widely but mistakenly cited as anticipating grounding. While they use ‘grounding’ and ‘in virtue of’ in their preliminary characterization of physicalism, they then go on to ask how physicalism should be formulated—they clearly don’t think they already formulated it using grounding-theoretic vocabulary. Berker (2016) argues that many debates in ethics and value theory have been formulated in terms of ‘in virtue of’ and ‘because’ long before Fine’s work. However, this at best shows moral philosophers’ (reasonable) preference to engage with first-order issues without being sidetracked by difficult questions in moral metaphysics, not their implicit recognition of grounding (cf. Dancy 2004: 85).

    Of the many alleged predecessors, Bolzano’s Grund (1837) comes closest to some contemporary notion of grounding. However, even this is a bit of a stretch. Bolzano was mainly interested in what he called “objective explanation”, thought of causal explanation as a special case of it, and didn’t seem keen on carving out an interesting class of metaphysical or otherwise non-causal explanations. For more on Bolzano’s views, see Tatzel (2002) and Schnieder (2014). (Thanks to Ghislain Guigon and Tuomas Tahko for discussion about the history of ‘grounding’.)

  8. See Carnap (1947: §2).

  9. Revolutionaries often emphasize that the connections they want to capture with grounding cannot be captured in modal terms (Schaffer 2009: 364–365; Rosen 2010: 110–114; Fine 2012a: 41), but as J. Wilson (2014) points out, this much is hardly controversial. On a more plausible construal of the argument, grounding would also need to be distinct from familiar non-modal relations, for example composition, realization, and set membership (Koslicki 2014: 306).

  10. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I discuss the relation between the Argument from Explanatoriness and the Argument from Theoretical Utility.

  11. See Schaffer (2009: 363–364), Fine (2012a: 28), and Trogdon (2013a: §2), and works to be cited below.

  12. Fine (2001, 2012a), Dasgupta (2014a, b); Litland forthcoming.

  13. Audi (2012a, b); Schaffer (2012, 2016); Skiles (2015); A. Wilson forthcoming.

  14. See Schnieder (2010: §1.d and 2014: 333–334) for a similar view.

  15. Some might prefer to identify “backing” with production instead. However, to object that the reactionary has no account of what produces the explanation facts would obviously beg the question in favor of production.

  16. See Audi (2012b: 687–688) and Schaffer (2016) for similar arguments.

  17. See deRosset (2010: 79–81) and Audi (2012b: 697–698) for similar constraints.

  18. P-theorists who claim that production suffices for metaphysical explanation only if certain pragmatic and epistemic factors are also in place cannot accept the argument as it stands (Audi 2012a: 119–120; Trogdon 2013b: 468–473). Since this complication would only make the p-theorist’s job harder, I will put it aside.

  19. More formally, let ‘∈a’ stand for ancestral set membership. Then a relation R* that guarantees the explanatory connection between [Socrates exists] and [{Socrates} exists] can be defined as follows: R*([α1 exists]…[αn exists], [β exists]) iff

    (a) [α1 exists]…[αn exists] necessitate [β exists]

    (b) ∀x (x∈{α1…αk} → x∈aβ)

    (c) ∀x (~ ∃y y∈x → (x∈a{α1…αk}↔ x∈aβ))

    (d) ∀x (x∈β → x∉a{α1…αk})

    (e) ∀x∀y (x ≠ y → (x, y ∈{α1…αk} → x∉a y))

    Note that necessitation may play a role in the explanation even if it’s something like a conceptual truth that if some things exist, their set exists too (barring the set-theoretical paradoxes). Conditions (b)–(d) aim to capture the informal idea that the entities whose existence is to be explained are built out of entities lower down in the set-theoretic hierarchy. Conditions (d)–(e) are negotiable. The former captures a strict non-circularity condition (the explanans cannot be the existence of some entities, the existence of some of which also figures in the explanandum), while the latter captures a minimality constraint on explanation, namely, that “irrelevancies [are] fatal to explanations” (Salmon 1977: 95; cf. Audi 2012b: 699–701).

  20. Koslicki (2014: 331) outlines an analogous strategy for making sense of the fundamental or derivative status of various kinds of entities.

  21. See Lewis (1983) for the sparse/abundant distinction. Thanks to Louis deRosset for drawing my attention to the abundant interpretation, and for forcing me to lay out the Restriction Approach more clearly.

  22. Strevens (2008); cf. Ruben (1990: Ch. 5, Ch. 7: 187–193); Lewis (1986: 226–227).

  23. Lipton (2001: 49).

  24. Cf. Woodward (2003), Strevens (2008). Similar remarks apply to the objection that some p-theorists have in mind a notion of explanation that has no epistemic connotations, and that causes do always explain their effects in this sense of ‘explain’. Explanation in this sense becomes indistinguishable from whatever explanation-making relation the p-theorist posits to explain it. The tendency to confuse explanation with explanation-making goes both ways round, and is chiefly responsible for the insistence of an epistemically untainted notion of explanation; in the philosophy of science, not even the most ardent realists work with such a notion (see, e.g., Kim 1994). In my view, the prevalence of ‘because’-talk in the grounding literature further encourages this confusion, since ‘because’ is systematically ambiguous between explanation and explanation-making (cf. Strawson 1985).

  25. An anonymous referee suggests that this line of reasoning relies on a particular interpretation of p-theorists, according to which production explains a sui generis notion of metaphysical explanation. Perhaps the p-theorist could say instead that production backs explanation tout court, rather than (or in addition to) metaphysical explanation (cf. Schaffer 2016). However, I think the switch to the general notion of explanation brings little improvement. To be sure, explanation tout court is easy to distinguish from production. But this is only because not all explanation involves production (for example, there are causal explanations), and this we already knew. The real challenge lies in distinguishing explanation when supposedly explained by production (never mind how we call it) from production itself. Again, take the analogy with causation. We don’t need to assume that there is a sui generis category of causal explanations for the following semantic hypothesis to be plausible: in those contexts in which we typically engage in ‘causation’-talk, sentences of the form ‘e caused f’ (or ‘f occurred because e occurred’) are systematically ambiguous between causal and explanatory claims. Therefore, our intuitions about causation are likely to be explanatorily tainted. Likewise for the non-causal explanations p-theorists are interested in (never mind how we call them) and the relation(s) supposedly underlying these explanations.

  26. See Shafer-Landau (2003: Ch. 3) and Ridge (2007).

  27. Wiggins (1968), Thomson (1998), Baker (2007).

  28. Shafer-Landau is not alone with this view; for a detailed account of property constitution, see Shoemaker (2003).

  29. Cf. Shafer-Landau (2003: 75–76).

  30. See Baker (2007: 36).

  31. Cf. Baker (2007: 37–38, 166–169).

  32. Ehring is relying here on Lewis (1991).

  33. This view is a close cousin of the subset account of realization, according to which mental properties have a proper subset of the causal powers of the physical properties that realize them (J. Wilson 1999 and Shoemaker 2007). Ehring proposes part-whole physicalism as “a metaphysical explanation for why the sets of causal powers of mental properties stand in the subset relation to the sets of causal powers of certain physical properties” (2011: 172, emphasis in the original).

  34. Schaffer (2010a) uses these examples to motivate priority monism, for our purposes the thesis that the existence of the cosmos explains the existence of all other material objects. However, we can accept these examples without endorsing priority monism. For example, perhaps the existence of all material objects is explained by the existence of mereologically complex subatomic particles; this is compatible both with the existence of gunk and with the explanatory priority of integrated objects to their arbitrary undetached parts.

  35. The notion of weak ground is not uncontroversial even among revolutionaries; deRosset (2013), for example, argues that it’s hopelessly obscure. However, this doesn’t matter for my present purposes. Fine’s notion of verification, and the example of John’s marrying Mary and Mary’s marrying John sharing the same verifier, is intelligible even if we don’t want to refer to it as a case of weak ground.

  36. Cf. Fine (2012a: 73, 2012b: 8).

  37. Note that the emerging view is more reactionary in spirit than J. Wilson’s. According Wilson (2014), the direction of metaphysical explanation is ultimately settled by primitive fundamentality facts. On my view such appeal is unnecessary: the direction of explanation should be decided by our general theory of explanation. For example, I am attracted to a unification view: the direction of explanation is settled holistically by which deductive systematization of the total set of accepted sentences is the most unified. (For more on this, see also see the next section.)

  38. Thanks to Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund, and Ghislain Guigon for helpful discussions about the extent to which the reactionary view about production might carry over to causation.

  39. See also Steiner (1978) on explanatory proofs in pure mathematics, and A. Baker 2005 on mathematical explanations in the empirical sciences.

  40. The explanation literature usually follows Hempel (1965) in mostly focusing on causal explanation, but most philosophers (including Hempel himself) also recognize non-causal forms of scientific explanation. Achinstein (1983: Ch. 7–8), for example, discusses in detail all of the following: (i) special-case-of-law explanations, (ii) classification explanations, (iii) identity explanations, (iv) derivation explanations, (v) functional explanations. None of these can plausibly be said to invoke explanatory relations.

  41. This means that I require the availability of a deductively valid argument for any full metaphysical explanation. And this, in turn, means that there cannot be metaphysical explanations that don’t involve at least the necessitation of the explanandum by the explanantia. However, Leuenberger (2014) and Skiles (2015) have recently argued that there are cases of grounding in which the grounds don’t necessitate what they ground. For example, Skiles argues that accidental universal generalizations are grounded in, but aren’t necessitated, by their instances (to get necessitation, we would need to add some kind of totality fact: “these are the only instances”). But then isn’t it sheer dogmatism to rule out such cases at the outset? I don’t think so. Putative examples of grounding without necessitation lose much of their force when interpreted as examples of metaphysical explanation without necessitation. Skiles’ treatment of grounding seems closer to the production conception, whereas Leuenberger isn’t explicit about whether he understands grounding as production or as metaphysical explanation. Moreover, their cases are much more plausible when understood as concerning the former. Compare: even in deterministic worlds, earlier states of the world don’t necessitate later states; they do so only in conjunction with the laws of nature. This is a good reason for thinking that causation is not a necessitating relation. But it would be hasty to conclude that the explananda of causal explanations aren’t necessitated by their explanantia; the right thing to say instead is that the explanantia include things other than the causes, for example, the relevant laws of nature. (Probabilistic causation is another matter. Many hold that chance effects strictly speaking have no explanation, while the probability of their occurrence can be explained deductively (Railton 1978; Kitcher 1989). Others disagree (Hempel 1965; Salmon 1984). Either way, probabilistic causation and explanation have no metaphysical analogue.) I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on grounding necessitarianism and its relevance to the possibility of “bare explanations”, and Dan Korman, Ted Sider, and Kelly Trogdon for helpful discussions about what the denial of the Generality Constraint amounts to.

  42. See Schaffer (2009: 376–377) and 2016: §3, §4.4, M. Cameron 2014, Koslicki 2014, J. Wilson 2014, and Berker 2016: §5–7.

  43. Schaffer’s (2016) structural equation models (cf. A. Wilson forthcoming) don’t amount to the kind of argument I have in mind. Production itself plays little role in these models; the heavy-lifting is done by non-trivial counterpossibles, which in turn are supposed to give us a better grasp of the concept of production. Perhaps this is an efficient strategy against production skeptics who think that the concept is incoherent or disunified (though see Koslicki 2016), but I don’t see why it should move those of us who just think it’s superfluous.

  44. The first one to mention it was Ted Sider.

  45. Friedman (1974), Kitcher (1989). On the “winner-take-all” conception of unification, any putative explanation that doesn’t belong to the most unified set of explanations is not an explanation at all, while according to a graded view it is just a less good explanation (Woodward 2003: 367–369). For simplicity’s sake I will assume the winner-take-all conception.

  46. A Kitcherian argument pattern is an ordered triple of (i) a schematic argument (a sequence of schematic sentences in which some non-logical expressions have been replaced by dummy letters), (ii) a set of sets of filling instructions that tell us what the substitution instances of each dummy letter are, and (iii) a classification: a set of sentences describing which sentences in the schematic argument are premises, which one is a conclusion, and which rules of inference are used. The notion of stringency also plays an important role in Kitcher’s theory: the more stringent a pattern is, the more it contributes to unification. Roughly speaking, stringency is a matter of how hard it is for an argument pattern to be instantiated: the more demanding constraints are imposed upon the logical and non-logical vocabulary of an argument pattern, the more stringent it is. However, as Kitcher himself admits, his criteria of stringency yield clear results only in a relatively small number of special cases. Since the choice between revolutionary and reactionary theories is not among these, in what follows I won’t pay too much attention to stringency.

  47. See Kitcher (1981: §5, 1989: §4) for more examples.

  48. Koslicki (2014: 330–331) makes a similar point, albeit in a different context.

  49. My guess would be: not very. For example, S2 doesn’t impose any restriction on the substitution instances of ψ1… ψn and φ.

  50. For similar arguments, see Fine 2012a, Dasgupta 2014b, and Litland forthcoming.

  51. See, for example, McCarthy (1977), Achinstein (1983: Ch. 5), and Ruben (1990: 196–198).

  52. See, for instance, Correia and Schnieder (2012) and Correia (2014).

  53. See Rosen (2010), Fine (2012a), Raven (2012), and Skiles (2015).

  54. See Armstrong (1978: 18) and Kim (1998: 84) for micro-basing.

  55. Cf. Schaffer (2009).

  56. Cf. Merricks (2013: 722).

  57. Thanks to Jon Litland for pressing the first objection, and to Shamik Dasgupta and Ted Sider for pushing me on the second.

  58. See also J. Wilson’s (2014: 556–557) discussion of Theodore Sider on using ‘grounding’ to express commitment to broad research programs.

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Acknowledgments

For many helpful comments on and numerous discussions about this paper, I’m especially indebted to Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund, and Ted Sider. For very helpful comments and discussion I’m also grateful to Paul Audi, Shamik Dasgupta, Louis deRosset, Eric Epstein, Ghislain Guigon, Dan Korman, Jon Litland, Eric Rowe, Nico Silins, Alex Skiles, Tuomas Tahko, Elanor Taylor, Kelly Trogdon, two anonymous referees, and audiences at the department workshop at Cornell University, the 88th Joint Session at the University of Cambridge, the 2nd Philosophy Unbound conference at Lehigh University, the 2015 Central APA at St. Louis, and the Research Group for the History and Philosophy of Science (RCH HAS) at Budapest.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, H 249, Bilkent, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    David Mark Kovacs

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  1. David Mark Kovacs
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Kovacs, D.M. Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness. Philos Stud 174, 2927–2952 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0818-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0818-9

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