Qualitative Grounds

Suppose that all non-qualitative facts are grounded in qualitative facts. I argue that this view naturally comes with a picture in which trans-world identity is indeterminate. But this in turn leads to either pervasive indeterminacy in the non-qualitative, or else contingency in what facts about modality and possible worlds are determinate. 1 Ground and Necessity Shamik Dasgupta argues that we shouldn’t think there are any fundamental facts about particular individuals: these would be undetectable danglers, redundant to our scientific explanations (2009; 2014; forthcoming; see also 2011; 2013). Rather, we should hold that all facts about particular individuals are grounded in what the world is like qualitatively.1 All non-qualitative facts hold in virtue of qualitative facts. He calls this “qualitativism”. (Other names for the view are “generalism”, This paper began as a section of a draft of another paper, “Quality and Quantifiers”, and took on a life of its own. I benefited from many helpful comments and conversations. Thanks especially to Shamik Dasgupta, John Hawthorne, Michaela McSweeney, Tom Møller-Nielsen, Jason Turner, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, a reading group at Baylor University, and an anonymous referee. 1“Fundamentally speaking, I claim, there are no such things as individuals” (Dasgupta 2009, 2). “Let qualitativism be the ... view that the most fundamental facts are qualitative facts and that they are sufficient to ground (or at least derivatively ground) the individualistic facts. ... I favor qualitativism. Very briefly, my reason is that if individualism were true then the individualistic facts of our world would lie beyond our epistemic ken” (Dasgupta 2014, 6). Compare these earlier statements (though not endorsements) of the view. “[D]oes thisness hold a place beside suchness as a fundamental feature of reality?” (Adams 1979, 5). “[M]etaphysical anti-Haecceitism is a doctrine concerning the identity of individuals. It states that the identity of individuals—or, at least, of certain individuals—is to be explained in terms of their purely qualitative features or in terms of their qualitative relationships to other individuals” (Fine 2005, 30). See also Turner (forthcoming) for critical discussion. As a point of biography I should note that Dasgupta reports in personal communication that he has changed his mind about the Qualitative Grounds thesis, for different reasons from those I discuss here.