Grounding explanations: The role of 'in virtue of' in philosophical inquiry.

摘要

In this study, I discuss a type of explanation that shows up in a variety of contexts, including philosophy and ordinary discourse. Consider the question, 'What makes a person tall?' Here are two possible answers one could offer: (1) Having the right genes makes a person tall. (2) Having a height that is significantly greater than average makes a person tall.;The first explanation is causal. It says that a tall person's genetic structure is what causes her to grow up to be tall. But the second claim explains a person's being tall in terms of what it is to be tall in the first place. Clearly, the later would be a non-causal explanation. In this work, I discuss what bearing an understanding of such 'grounding' explanations has on our understanding of philosophical analysis. I argue that a clear understanding of grounding explanations points the way to a solution to the so-called paradox of analysis. According to discussions of the paradox, claims to the effect that a certain concept should be analyzed in terms of other concepts seem, on the one hand, to be informative but seem, on the other hand, not to be even potentially informative because they say that the concept should be analyzed in terms of itself. I argue that we should understand analysis claims in terms of grounding explanations and that when we do this, we have the beginnings of a solution to the paradox of analysis.;I also discuss the theory of truth-making. Truth-maker theorists ask the question, 'What makes claims, beliefs, etc. true?' This is a request for a grounding explanation. Typically, a theory of truth-making says that, for every truth, there exists an entity that makes it true (e.g., a fact or states of affairs). There are, however, problematic cases. If truth is grounded in the existence of entities, then what sort of entity could ground the truth that there is no Santa Claus? In the study, I develop a theory of truth-making that grounds truth in something other than facts or states, which enables us to handle problematic cases of the sort just mentioned.