Pearson, Olley (2022) Grounding, Well-foundedness, and Terminating Chains. Philosophia . ISSN 0048-3893
Full content URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00593-x
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Item Type: | Article |
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Item Status: | Live Archive |
Abstract
It has recently been argued that foundationalists, those who take grounding to be well-founded, should not understand the well-foundedness of grounding as the condition that every grounding chain terminates in the downward direction, because this interpretation of well-foundedness fails to correctly classify certain complex grounding structures. Some structures that plausibly would be acceptable to the foundationalist are classified as not well-founded and others that plausibly would not be acceptable to the foundationalist are classified as well-founded. In this paper I provide a characterisation of well-foundedness in terms of termination that correctly characterises all these difficult cases. This acts as a response to these recent arguments. Furthermore, it allows us to better evaluate their importance: these arguments have not shown that foundationalists are wrong to harbour the intuition that grounding chains must terminate in the downward direction, rather, they have shown that foundationalists need to be more clear about this intuition and how it is born out in more complex grounding structures.
Keywords: | grounding, well-founded, foundationalism |
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Subjects: | V Historical and Philosophical studies > V500 Philosophy |
Divisions: | College of Arts > Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage > Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage (Humanities) |
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ID Code: | 52339 |
Deposited On: | 19 Dec 2022 11:41 |
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