Do we need a single, primitive “Grounding” relation to explain metaphysical dependence, or can a plural toolkit of more specific relations do the job while still making sense of emergence and physicalism?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Jessica Wilson is Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her area of research focuses on a range of topics in metaphysics, from grounding, emergence, causation, and more, as well as the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphilosophy.
2. Interview Summary
Jessica Wilson begins by distinguishing “big-G Grounding” from the many specific “small-g” metaphysical dependence relations philosophers already use. Big-G Grounding is meant to be a primitive, generic dependence relation that applies across any context, whereas small-g relations include more “off-the-shelf” resources (realization, part–whole, conjunction/disjunction, etc.) that can already do substantive metaphysical work. Wilson’s skepticism isn’t skepticism about metaphysical dependence in general, but about whether we need a single primitive generic relation over and above a plural toolkit of specific dependence relations, especially once we compare full “package deals” about metaphysical structure (what’s fundamental, and how the non-fundamental depends on it).
On her preferred “fundamental-first” package, what counts as fundamental is a worldly matter rather than a mere stipulation, though our methodology often starts with working hypotheses (for example, “suppose the cosmos is fundamental” or “suppose microphysical goings-on are fundamental”) to see how well an overall picture accommodates case studies and scientific commitments. She emphasizes that debates like monism versus atomism can be assessed using broadly abductive criteria (the same style of reasoning used across science and philosophy), while also urging intellectual humility: we are not in a position to declare major methodological theses decisively settled, and we should acknowledge the provisional status of many commitments while still treating “conditional knowledge” as real progress.
A major stretch of the interview then connects methodological assumptions to emergence and physicalism. Wilson unpacks David Hume’s dictum by explaining why it is often restricted to “distinct, intrinsically typed” existences (so it won’t be trivially falsified by cases where something is defined in terms of relations to something else). She distinguishes weak from strong metaphysical emergence: weak emergence involves complete synchronic dependence plus a kind of autonomy, while strong emergence requires only partial dependence together with genuinely novel powers. She also argues that even weakly emergent phenomena can be “distinctively efficacious” not by adding new powers (which would threaten physicalism), but by having a distinctive subset power-profile that supports different explanatory and difference-making patterns, engaging the familiar overdetermination worry associated with Jaegwon Kim. Finally, on characterizing the physical, she sketches a response to “Campbell’s dilemma” by taking physics (present or idealized) as an extensional guide while adding a “no fundamental mentality” constraint, so that a future physics that posited fundamentally conscious entities would not automatically count them as “physical.”
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:42 - Conceptions of grounding
04:41 - Deciding between accounts
13:38 - Determining what is fundamental
18:10 - Skepticism about metaphysical theorizing
21:35 - Are disputes over fundamentality substantive?
28:28 - Making progress
31:03 - Hume’s dictum
33:44 - Hume’s dictum and emergence
42:09 - Why believe Hume’s dictum?
46:07 - Characterizing the physical
52:31 - Potential issue for this account
53:40 - Powers and emergence
58:34 - Causes specific to effects
59:59 - Overdetermination
1:04:12 - No fundamental level?
1:16:01 - Metaphysical modality?
1:19:59 - Indeterminate states of affairs
1:29:21 - Problems for Cartesian skepticism
1:33:40 - Epistemic contextualism
1:34:34 - Barriers to philosophical progress
1:40:49 - Conclusion
