Setting the story straight: fictionalism about grounding

Philosophical Studies 179 (2):343-361 (2021)
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Abstract

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

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Author's Profile

Naomi Thompson
University of Bristol

Citations of this work

Fictionalism.Matti Eklund - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Varieties of Grounding Skepticism.David Mark Kovacs - 2023 - The Monist 106 (3):301-316.
No Grounds for Fictionalism.Robert Knowles - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3679-3687.

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References found in this work

Writing the Book of the World.Theodore Sider - 2011 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation.Michael Strevens - 2008 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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.

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