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      Grounding and the Argument from Explanatoriness

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      Author(s)
      Kovacs, D. M.
      Date
      2017
      Source Title
      Philosophical Studies
      Print ISSN
      0031-8116
      Publisher
      Springer Netherlands
      Volume
      174
      Issue
      12
      Pages
      2927 - 2952
      Language
      English
      Type
      Article
      Item Usage Stats
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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. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
      Keywords
      Causal explanation
      Constitution
      Constitutive explanation
      Grounding
      Metaphysical explanation
      Scientific explanation
      Unification
      Permalink
      http://hdl.handle.net/11693/37461
      Published Version (Please cite this version)
      http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0818-9
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      • Department of Philosophy 216
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