Abstract
Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded (“the meta-grounding thesis”) must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of “well-founded”, which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with any of the three notions of “well-founded”. Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 349-379 |
Number of pages | 31 |
Journal | Journal of Philosophical Logic |
Volume | 45 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2016 |
Keywords
- Foundationalism
- Ground
- Grounding grounding
- Infinite regress
- Metaphysical dependence
- Well-founded
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Philosophy