Tobias Alexius: "Grounding, Constitution and Nothing-Over-and-Aboveness"

Tobias Alexius, Uppsala universitet: "Grounding, Constitution and Nothing-Over-and-Aboveness"

Abstract
Some philosophers have argued that liberal metaphysical pictures – according to which many entities/facts exist – can be spared Ockham’s wrath so long as the majority of these entities/facts are grounded in some sparse basis of entities/facts. This is because grounding – the relation of synchronic, metaphysical constitution at the heart of metaphysical explanations – generate ‘nothing-over-and-aboveness’ (i.e. constrains the cost of grounded entities to be nothing over and above the cost of the entities that ground them). In this paper, I present challenges to this picture. I argue that standard notions of grounding fail to deliver this sort of parsimony, and that at least one salient alternative – which focuses on grounding facts that are indexed to particular worlds, times and places – is capable of generating parsimony only at the cost of expanding the fundamental domain.