Conference Agenda
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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S69: Metaphysics/Ontology 5 Location: 23.21 U1.95 Session Chair: Siegfried Jaag | |
| Presentation 1 | |
1:30pm - 2:15pm
The grounding of generalisations and negations: trans-categorial grounding and grounding by absence Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany This talk outlines an unorthodox view of grounding that solves problems with generalisations and negations. Concerning conjunctions, the principle that any contents p, q jointly ground (p & q) mirrors an introduction rule and a principle of semantic composition for conjunctive sentences. The strategy is to model other grounding principles after similar introduction and composition principles. Grounding is construed as non-factual but as reality-transferring: the truth of p, q is transferred to (p & q). Universal generalisations are not grounded by their instances (plus some dubious totality fact). Instead, the grounding is trans-categorial: any predicable F grounds (everything Fs); predicable F’s reality status of being present at every object is transformed into the truth of (everything Fs). Applied to existential generalisations, this predicables account solves Fine’s puzzles. The account of the grounding of negations assumes grounding by absence: any content p grounds its negation not-p; the irreality (falsity) of the ground is transformed into the reality (truth) of the groundee. A moderate Platonism is suggested: grounding facts are non-worldly though objective facts that correspond to our introductory inferential practices; they generate logical structures in the concrete world without such structures having to be part of the world in advance. | |

