Grounding and Naturalness have been two important concepts in the Metaphysician's toolbox. They are both used to cash out the notion of fundamentality; that is, proponents of both concepts propose certain criteria for counting a property/fact as more fundamental than another. In this paper, I will explore whether there is any plausible systematic connection between the criteria the two concepts offer for fundamentality and argue that there is none. In the end, I suggest that we should stick to one consistent use of naturalness first and then explore further which concept offer a better notion of fundamentality. / Master of Arts / Philosophers like to ask questions about fundamentality like the following: does our world have a fundamental layer? What are (if any) the fundamental building blocks of our world? These are all metaphysical questions; they aim at exploring theoretical issues that in some way or another help us understand what our world is like. In the spirit to answer these metaphysical questions, philosophers also need to fill in some epistemology: what are some criteria of fundamentality; when is one thing more fundamental than another. In this paper, I will explore two prominent accounts of fundamentality that philosophers have developed: Grounding and Naturalness. Grounding captures the intuitive idea that one fact can be grounded or explained in terms of another more fundamental fact, while naturalness captures the intuitive idea that some properties are more natural (less arbitrary, and therefore, more fundamental) than others. Proponents of these concepts offer their own criteria for fundamentality, and I will argue that there is no systematic connection between their criteria in this paper. This paper shows us that we are still quite far away from a unifying theory of fundamentality. In the end, I also suggest some direction for how we should understand the concepts we use to capture the notion of fundamentality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119457 |
| Date | 14 June 2024 |
| Creators | Li, Dexin |
| Contributors | Philosophy, Trogdon, Kelly Griffith, Sud, Rohan, Hoek, Daniel |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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