Scribble at 2018-08-22 22:46:30 Last modified: unmodified
Recently, many philosophers have claimed that the world has an ordered, hierarchical structure, where entities at lower ontological levels are said to metaphysically ground entities at higher ontological levels. Other philosophers have recently claimed that our language has an ordered, hierarchical structure. Semantically primitive sentences are said to conceptually ground less primitive sentences. It’s often emphasized that metaphysical grounding is a relation between things out in the world, not a relation between our sentences. But conflating these relations is easy to do, given that both types of grounding are expressed by non-causal “in-virtue-of” claims. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between metaphysical and conceptual grounding. I argue that conceptual and metaphysical grounding are exclusive: if a given in-virtue-of claim involves conceptual grounding, then it does not involve metaphysical grounding. I also develop some heuristics for deciding which type of grounding is relevant in a given case. These heuristics suggest that many proposed cases of metaphysical grounding do not actually involve metaphysical grounding at all.
こういう論説を見かけると不思議に感じるのだけれど、「概念」と「観念」の区別について（そして、この区別の正否について）堅実なサーベイなり論説を展開している著作というものが非常に少ないと感じるんだよね。通俗的な本にしても、こういうことを素通りして、センサーにかかる思想オタクにしか伝わらないような書き方をするから駄目なのだ。特に日本の哲学プロパーが書く哲学の対話編なんて、ほぼ全てが灘高生と東大名誉教授の出来レースみたいなものを読まされる羽目になる。専門の人間からすれば一定の読み応えはあるが、結局のところ入門書としては役に立たないクソを撒き散らして啓蒙したつもりになってるなんて著者は、まったく文科省の官僚並みと言っていい世間知らずだ。