Grounding and Necessity

The Necessity of Separating Control and Logic When Grounding Language using Neuroevolution

In this research we analyze the task of evolving a neural network to understand simple English commands. By understand we mean that the final agent will perform tasks and interact with objects in its world as instructed by the experimenter. The lexicon and grammar are kept small in this experiment. This type of work where semantics are based on an agent’s perceptions and actions is referred to ...

Grounding and Omniscience

I’m going to argue that omniscience is impossible and therefore that there is no God. The argument turns on the notion of grounding. After illustrating and clarifying that notion, I’ll start the argument in earnest. The first step will be to lay out five claims, one of which is the claim that there is an omniscient being, and the other four of which are claims about grounding. I’ll prove that t...

Grounding, transitivity, and contrastivity

Truth-Grounding and Transitivity

It is argued that if we take grounding to be univocal, then there is a serious tension between truthgrounding and one commonly assumed structural principle for grounding, namely transitivity. The primary claim of the paper is that truth-grounding cannot be transitive. Accordingly, it is either the case that grounding is not transitive or that truth-grounding is not grounding, or both.

Intrinsicality and grounding

A number of philosophers have recently claimed that intrinsicality can be analysed in terms of the metaphysical notion of grounding. Since grounding is a hyperintensional notion, accounts of intrinsicality in terms of grounding, unlike most other accounts, promise to be able to discriminate between necessarily coextensive properties that differ in whether they are intrinsic. They therefore prom...