Ground in Philosophy of Science

Haktan Akcin (Lingnan University): “Naturalized metaphysics, modal structuralism, and grounding” I try to clarify the structuralist claim that the world has an objective modal structure with reference to the recent grounding discussions. Against criticisms that the ontological priority relations in OSR are vague, I highlight the scale-relative ontology suggested by Ladyman & Ross. Since structure is the real pattern in a scale-relative ontology, structure itself turns out to be the essence understood as the ontological prior. The analogy with grounding argument here might be established via Fines suggestion that modality is grounded in essence. In a similar vein, we could argue that structure precedes modality in OSR. Along the way, I defend the necessitarian understanding of grounding, since otherwise our link to the ontological dependence relations, as pointed out by the opponents of OSR, would be lost. I finish by drawing an analogy between OSR and grounding with respect to causation. Grounding is usually understood as the metaphysical priority relation distinct from causation, and this approach is very much in accordance with Ladyman & Ross’ exclusion of causation from fundamental ontology due to the fact that causal powers do not play a central role in fundamental physics. Philipp Blum (University of Lucerne): “Structuralism and relational individuation” Recent and not-so-recent brands of structuralism have been motivated by the need to relationally individuate physical entities. The precise form of the argument from relational individuation to being ’nothing over and above’ nodes in a structure has not been spelt out. I discuss critically several forms of such an argument, contrast them with parallel cases in the philosophy of mathematics and conclude that the prospects for a distinctly physical form of physicalism do not look good. Fabio Ceravolo (University of Leeds): “Superinternal grounding vs relativistic composition” Fans of grounding have been attracted by its promise to eschew eliminativism on medium-sized dry goods – understood as bearers of ordinary sortals: ‘is a table’, ‘is a chair’, etc. But the details are as yet unrevealed. In order to mark a way forward, I propose the following naturalistic methodology. One takes a physical theory that clearly poses an eliminativistic challenge. Following, one looks at which relation among the resources posed by the theory is responsible for raising the challenge. Finally, the relation is supplemented with the grounding-like features sufficient to solve the challenge. The supplementation, however, should not violate empirical adequacy and should not presuppose any further fundamental ideological structure, on pain of scoring lower on a virtue-theoretic count than the theory’s eliminativistic interpretation. While the method nicely sets grounding in a naturalistically evaluable context, I will suggest (admittedly provisionally) that in some special relativistic cases the only grounding variety suitable for supplementing a physical package is not one that scores on a par on the minimality of fundamental ideology. Nina Emery (Brown University): “Laws and their instances” What is the relation between a scientific law and its instances? This question has received little discussion in the literature, but neither does it have an obvious answer. On the one hand, many will want the relation between a law and its instances to be explanatory. On the other hand, few will think the relation between a law and its instances is causal. In this talk, I explore the view that laws ground their instances. I compare this view to several competing accounts including those given by Woodward (2005) and Skow (2016). And I discuss several consequences that follow from it, including consequences for Loewers (2012) proposal for how make sense of