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17304
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As causation links across time, grounding links the world across levels [Schaffer,J]
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Full Idea:
Grounding is something like metaphysical causation. Just as causation links the world across time, grounding links the world across levels. Grounding connects the more fundamental to the less fundamental, and thereby backs a certain form of explanation.
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From:
Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], Intro)
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A reaction:
Obviously you need 'levels' for this, which we should take to be structural levels.
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17308
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Explaining 'Adam ate the apple' depends on emphasis, and thus implies a contrast [Schaffer,J]
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Full Idea:
Explaining why ADAM ate the apple is a different matter from explaining why he ATE the apple, and from why he ate THE APPLE. ...In my view the best explanations incorporate ....contrastive information.
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From:
Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.3.1)
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A reaction:
But why are the contrasts Eve, or throwing it, or a pear? It occurs to me that this is wrong! The contrast is with anything else which could have gone in subject, verb or object position. It is a matter of categories, not of contrasts.
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17305
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I take what is fundamental to be the whole spatiotemporal manifold and its fields [Schaffer,J]
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Full Idea:
I myself would prefer to speak of what is fundamental in terms of the whole spatiotemporal manifold and the fields that permeate it, with parts counting as derivative of the whole.
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From:
Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.1.1)
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A reaction:
Not quite the Parmenidean One, since it has parts, but a nice try at updating the great man. Note the reference to 'fields', suggesting that this view is grounded in the physics rather than metaphysics. How many fields has it got?
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17307
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Nowadays causation is usually understood in terms of equations and variable ranges [Schaffer,J]
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Full Idea:
The leading treatments of causation work within 'structural equation models', with events represented via variables each of which is allotted a range of permitted values, which constitute a 'contrast space'.
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From:
Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.3.1)
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A reaction:
Like Woodward's idea that causation is a graph, this seems to be a matter of plotting or formalising correlations between activities, which is a very Humean approach to causation.
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15877
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The aim of science is just to create a comprehensive, elegant language to describe brute facts [Poincaré, by Harré]
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Full Idea:
In Poincaré's view, we try to construct a language within which the brute facts of experience are expressed as comprehensively and as elegantly as possible. The job of science is the forging of a language precisely suited to that purpose.
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From:
report of Henri Poincaré (The Value of Science [1906], Pt III) by Rom Harré - Laws of Nature 2
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A reaction:
I'm often struck by how obscure and difficult our accounts of self-evident facts can be. Chairs are easy, and the metaphysics of chairs is hideous. Why is that? I'm a robust realist, but I like Poincaré's idea. He permits facts.
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