Under one conception of philosophy, we are to seek the truth under the guidance of logical reasoning. Nothing is more fundamental to that kind of philosophy than entailment—except perhaps a handful of core concepts like being and nonbeing, sameness and difference. Here, we explore a theory that grounds entailment in the being and nonbeing of properties. In a nutshell: we understand ‘properties’ to be ways for things to be. We assume that there exist ways for things to be. We understand one thing to ‘entail’ another when there is no way to avoid it. We take these occurrences of ‘to be,’ and ‘there exist,’ and ‘there is no way,’ and other such terms, as applied to ‘properties’ and ‘ways,’ with robust ontological seriousness. The same ontological seriousness applies to the kind of necessitation that is intrinsic to the laws of nature. Things obey the laws of nature because there is no way for those things to do anything else. To tease out what that means requires the construction of a detailed theory of properties construed as ways for things to be.
I had an academic career as a Philosopher and have now retired as an Emeritus Professor at Monash University, Clayton Campus, Victoria, Australia 3800. I have a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, England, and a PhD in English from Monash University, Australia... Read More →
Cases of coincidence, the paradigmatic example being the statue and the lump of clay, involve purported property differences that motivate the claim that there are numerically distinct coincident objects. These cases are philosophically important insofar as they put pressure on a range of interconnected questions and intuitions about material objects and their individuation, persistence conditions, location, and mereology.
The standard taxonomy of responses to these cases is relatively coarse-grained: one either accepts numerically distinct coincident objects (pluralism) or rejects them (monism), with a handful of further disagreements among variants. I argue that this picture significantly underdescribes the landscape and that disagreement over these cases involves several dimensions.
I will focus on the distinction between different ways that coincident, or merely apparently coincident, objects might be related to one another, differentiating locative coincidence from mereological coincidence. I then offer and defend methodological conceptual pluralism: a particular view about which concept(s) of coincidence we ought to employ, given the goal of clarifying what these cases consist of. This reveals multiple layers of disagreement: metaphysical, conceptual, and higher-order conceptual. The result is a far more fine-grained set of competing views of what these cases involve. It also shows that some arguments for or against the standard coarse-grained positions, in fact, target only subsets of these more fine-grained views.
Metaphysical foundationalists hold that grounding has an explanatory role and that this role can be fulfilled only if there are fundamental entities. Accordingly, anti-foundationalist views face a charge of explanatory failure: without a fundamental level, certain explanatory demands go unmet. Recently, Cameron (2022) has challenged the assumption that grounding is inherently explanatory. If this argument succeeds, it provides the anti-foundationalist a way to resist the foundationalist’s charge by severing the connection between grounding and explanation. In this talk, I defend foundationalism against this strategy in two ways. First, I show that Cameron’s objections stem from a conflation of distinct explanatory claims and, at times, from misidentification of the direction of the grounding relation. Once we correct these issues, the link between grounding and explanation is successfully preserved. Second, I show that detaching explanation from grounding carries significant theoretical costs: it weakens grounding’s ability to play its central structuring role in metaphysics and blurs its identity, rendering it indistinguishable from other dependence relations. Finally, I argue that separating grounding from explanation undermines our understanding of the nature of grounding itself and exposes it to skeptical concerns about its intelligibility.
Explanatory appeals to abstract ‘objects’ (numbers, moral values/principles, possible worlds etc…) are ubiquitous in philosophy, science, and everyday reasoning. Cicadas emerge in prime-number cycles because of number-theoretic advantages, lying is wrong because it violates the categorical imperative, Celtic FC would have won yesterday’s match had the referee been unbiased. Many philosophers take such claims’ explanatory usefulness to justify ontological commitment to the abstracta involved. Yet, by definition, abstracta are spatially and causally removed from the concrete world we seek to explain, raising a fundamental question: when, if ever, does explanatory appeal to abstracta genuinely license belief in their existence?
To answer this, I propose a methodological framework which distinguishes merely representative/heuristic explanations from metaphysically substantive ones. Two criteria structure the framework: ‘Basis’, scrutinises the reality of explanans and explanandum (independent of their inclusion in a particular explanation); and ‘Relevance’, assessing whether the explanans stands in an appropriate ontic-explanatory relation to the explanandum.
Applying this framework to case studies in mathematics, morality, and modality, I argue that explanatory appeals to abstracta systematically fail both criteria. Abstraction may be an indispensable representational tool, but abstracta themselves are never adequate explanans for why the concrete world truly is as it is.
In this paper, I address the Special Omission Question (SOQ): under what conditions does a disjunction count as an omission? If omissions are events essentially specified as non-occurrences, then their conditions of occurrence can be formulated as disjunctions of overly varied disjuncts. This suggests that omissions are disjunctive events. For example, one might say that the universe omits to contain events that violate the laws of nature (see Lewis 1986a: 190). I suggest that this kind of case still counts as an omission, and I further discuss some additional difficult cases that have largely been ignored in the literature. I consider three possible answers to the SOQ: always, never, and sometimes. Rather than decisively rejecting the first two options, I develop the ‘sometimes’ view: some disjunctions count as omissions, while others do not. This view provides a way to distinguish genuine omissions from arbitrary disjunctions. Compared with my theory, I suggest that Silver’s (2018) theory is not adequate to account for omissions.
