Is reality fundamentally built from many parts, or does everything ultimately depend on the whole through a layered structure of grounding and explanation?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and also working in epistemology, mind, and language.
2. Interview Summary
Jonathan Schaffer discusses how metaphysical theorizing about “what’s fundamental” should be guided—at least in part—by our best, most unified physical theories. In the opening, he motivates a broadly monistic picture on which the cosmos as a whole is a prime candidate for fundamentality, since it is the system most directly characterized by the fundamental dynamical laws, while many other descriptions are only approximate. He also pushes back on the worry that this “privileges physics” in a question-begging way: the thought is that we can consult the most powerful, unifying scientific posits without already assuming that either parts or wholes must be fundamental, and then let that scientific picture constrain metaphysical hypotheses.
A large portion of the interview then turns to grounding: how to treat it methodologically, what its role is in metaphysical explanation, and how to adjudicate disputes about its status. Schaffer recommends a kind of methodological primitivism—grounding can be used fruitfully even if no reductive analysis is in hand—and he frames an influential debate (e.g., with Jessica Wilson) around two key axes: (i) whether grounding is a single, substantially unified relation or merely a label for a heterogeneous bundle, and (ii) whether we should take grounding as primitive and define “fundamental” as ungrounded, or instead take fundamentality as primitive and then try to reconstruct grounding. He argues that starting with grounding helps preserve the ordering structure among nonfundamental levels (e.g., chemical vs. biological), which is obscured if we only draw a fundamental/nonfundamental cut.
In the later sections, Schaffer broadens the methodological theme by looking at context-sensitivity in philosophical discourse—especially in epistemology (and by extension, causation). He treats “shifty” knowledge attributions as a real phenomenon to be explained, and sketches a contextualist/relevant-alternatives style framework on which knowledge is not merely a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition, but can depend on a contextually supplied question or set of relevant alternatives; he suggests parallel structure for causal talk (e.g., contrastive or alternative-sensitive causation). He closes with a reflective account of why metaphysics is worth doing: the puzzles feel gripping and occasionally yield fleeting moments of insight, but even more often the value lies in the wonder and reward of engaging seriously with deep questions at all.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:32 - Cosmos as fundamental
02:20 - Fundamental laws
04:26 - Why privilege physics?
07:42 - Grounding relation as primitive
10:11 - Primitives as a theoretical cost
11:32 - Communicating primitives
17:21 - Concept development
20:52 - Jessica Wilson’s view
29:30 - Losing structure with fundamental-first account
31:54 - Is the dispute substantive?
36:29 - Skepticism about metaphysics
41:26 - John Heil’s criticism
46:15 - Ground between the gaps
47:57 - Mind and brain
50:24 - Further gaps?
54:24 - Epistemic contextualism
59:57 - How relevant are common intuitions?
1:04:02 - Problems with common usage
1:07:33 - “Causation” as context-sensitive
1:12:52 - View not metaphysical?
1:15:56 - Value of philosophy
1:18:02 - Conclusion
