Irreflexivity of Grounding Again
I wrote my thoughts from two posts ago up into a little note. Comments very welcome!
Long Words Bother Me
Philosophy. Straight. With ice and lemonade, a cherry and a slice of lemon.
I wrote my thoughts from two posts ago up into a little note. Comments very welcome!
Interesting. I’m no friend to grounding, so all the attacks on assumptions about it, the better! But why only attack the anti-reflexivity? The assumed anti-symmetry seems just as worth a candidate target.
Now, admittedly, the failure of identity substitutions won’t help you there. But I’m not sure about that example in any case. In the belief case, once the Sheriff of Nottingham has realised that Robin Hood = Robin of Locksley, he ought to update his now inconsistent beliefs. In the case that you discuss, you imagine that we have discovered that pain states are brain states; so oughtn’t you update your grounding claims? More to the point: Why would you persist with them at all?
Continuing with that thought, you have an odd pair of sentences: “On the one hand, ‘x grounds itself’ is always false. But on the other, sometimes ‘x grounds y’ is true, where x=y, which, it seems, ought to mean that sometimes x *does* ground itself.” It seems fair to say that you can’t have it both ways. And I think the reason you find yourself in trouble at that point is that you’ve created something like a Moorean paradox: *you* believe that x=y, and so the hyperintensional features of the context ought to slip away (at least from *your* claims about grounding). So you ought to be allowed substitution.
Hi Tim,
I agree that anti-symmetry is a worthy target too, I just haven’t got such clear-cut things to say about it.
I think there are various reasons why one might reasonably persist with grounding claims after identifying the grounded state with the grounding one. E.g., you might believe that there is an explanatory asymmetry between ‘S is in pain’ and ‘S is in brain state B’ (maybe due to some metaphysically interesting properties of the relevant states pain-y features and brain-y features) and you might express this by your grounding claim.
I guess I actually think I kind of can have it both ways with ‘x grounds itself’ (although I wasn’t planning to go into this in the note itself). That is, I think I can get myself into contexts where it will be true and contexts where it will be false.
I think the same about ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham believes that Robin of Locksley is a very naughty boy’. In some contexts that means he has a belief, about Robin L, that he is a very naughty boy (which is true, because he has such a belief about Robin Hood, who is Robin of L). But in other contexts it implies that the Sheriff has such a belief about Robin L de dicto, which is false.
Similarly, I think in some contexts ‘x grounds x’ can be true, because it is meant de re, so that the truth of ‘y grounds x’ and ‘x=y’ is enough. In other contexts, I think it implies more than that; maybe (e.g.) it implies that one can give an interesting metaphysical explanation of x just by citing x under the description ‘x’. In those contexts, it is false.