Laws and the Completeness of the Fundamental

In Mark Jago (ed.), Reality Making. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 11-37 (2016)
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Abstract

Any explanation of one fact in terms of another will appeal to some sort of connection between the two. In a causal explanation, the connection might be a causal mechanism or law. But not all explanations are causal, and neither are all explanatory connections. For example, in explaining the fact that a given barn is red in terms of the fact that it is crimson, we might appeal to a non-causal connection between things’ being crimson and their being red. Many such connections, like this one, are general rather than particular. I call these general non-causal explanatory connections 'laws of metaphysics'. In this paper I argue that some of these laws are to be found in the world at its most fundamental level, forming a bridge between fundamental reality and everything else. It is only by admitting fundamental laws, I suggest, that we can do justice to the explanatory relationship between what is fundamental and what is not. And once these laws are admitted, we are able to provide a nice resolution of the puzzle of why there are any non-fundamental facts in the first place.

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Author's Profile

Martin Glazier
Scripps College

Citations of this work

Fundamentality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Laws for Metaphysical Explanation.Jonathan Schaffer - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):302-321.
Modality is Not Explainable by Essence.Carlos Romero - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274):121-141.
The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations.Daniel Fogal & Olle Risberg - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15.

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References found in this work

On what grounds what.Jonathan Schaffer - 2009 - In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 347-383.
Monism: The Priority of the Whole.Jonathan Schaffer - 2010 - Philosophical Review 119 (1):31-76.
No Work for a Theory of Grounding.Jessica M. Wilson - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (5-6):535-579.
Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.Gideon Rosen - 2010 - In Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology. Oxford University Press. pp. 109-135.
Guide to Ground.Kit Fine - 2012 - In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--80.

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