Does the capacity to think require the capacity to sense? A lively debate on this topic runs throughout the history of philosophy and now animates discussions of artificial intelligence. Many have argued that AI systems such as large language models cannot think and understand if they lack sensory grounding. I argue that thought does not require sensory grounding: there can be pure thinkers who can think without any sensory capacities. As a result, the absence of sensory grounding (...) does not entail that large language models cannot think or understand. I also consider to what extent quasi-sensory grounding can at least boost the performance of a language model. (shrink)

This paper critically revises the organisational account of teleology, which argues that living systems are first and foremost oriented towards a goal: maintaining their own conditions of existence. It points out some limitations of this account, mainly in the capability to account for the richness and complexity of biological systems and their purposeful behaviours. It identifies the reason of these limitations in the theoretical grounding of this account, specifically in the too narrow notion of closure of constraints, focused on (...) self-production. It proposes to ground an organisational account of biological teleology in the capability of living system not just to produce and replace their parts, but to control their own internal dynamics and behaviours in such a way as to maintain themselves. This theoretical framework has two advantages. It better captures the distinctive features of biological organisations and consequently the richness and active nature of their purposeful behaviours. By doing so, it makes it possible to apply this framework beyond minimal theoretical models to real biological cases. (shrink)

A number of philosophers think that grounding is, in some sense, well-founded. This thesis, however, is not always articulated precisely, nor is there a consensus in the literature as to how it should be characterized. In what follows, I consider several principles that one might have in mind when asserting that grounding is well-founded, and I argue that one of these principles, which I call ‘full foundations’, best captures the relevant claim. My argument is by the process of (...) elimination. For each of the inadequate principles, I illustrate its inadequacy by showing either that it excludes cases that should not be ruled out by a well-foundedness axiom for grounding, or that it admits cases that should be ruled out. (shrink)

A common view in the metaphysics of ground is that all grounding facts are grounded. This generates an infinite regress of ever more grounding of grounding facts, but most grounding theorists take the regress to be harmless. However, in this paper, I argue that the regress is in fact vicious, therefore some grounding facts are ungrounded. Since the regress appears to fall out of two plausible principles of fundamentality, I offer a new interpretation of them (...) that allows for ungrounded grounding facts. (shrink)

The relation of ontological dependence or grounding, expressed by the terminology of separation and priority in substance, plays a central role in Aristotle’s Categories, Metaphysics, De Anima and elsewhere. The article discusses three current interpretations of this terminology. These are drawn along the lines of, respectively, modal-existential ontological dependence, essential ontological dependence, and grounding or metaphysical explanation. I provide an opinionated introduction to the topic, raising the main interpretative questions, laying out a few of the exegetical and philosophical (...) options that influence one’s reading, and locating questions of Aristotle scholarship within the discussion of ontological dependence and grounding in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

This article reviews eight proposed strategies for solving the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP), which was given its classic formulation in Harnad (1990). After a concise introduction, we provide an analysis of the requirement that must be satisfied by any hypothesis seeking to solve the SGP, the zero semantical commitment condition. We then use it to assess the eight strategies, which are organised into three main approaches: representationalism, semi-representationalism and non-representationalism. The conclusion is that all the strategies are semantically committed (...) and hence that none of them provides a valid solution to the SGP, which remains an open problem. (shrink)

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have (...) entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind. (shrink)

Despite the tight connection between grounding and explanation, Thompson (2016) and Maurin (2019) have recently argued that explanation cannot be an epistemic guide to ground. Skiles & Trogdon (2021) disagree. Reconstructing Thompson’s and Maurin’s worry about grounding and explanation as a dilemma, they argue that one of the horns of this dilemma can be resisted, such that explanation can be an epistemic guide to ground. In this paper, I offer a different solution by showing that the other horn (...) of the respective dilemma can be resisted as well. I show that the present solution is preferable to Skiles & Trogdon’s (2021). (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

Pluralists believe in the occurrence of numerically distinct spatiotemporal coincident objects. They argue that there are coincident objects that share all physical and spatiotemporal properties and relations; nevertheless, they differ in terms of modal and some other profiles. Appealing to the grounding problem according to which nothing can ground the modal differences between coincident objects, monists reject the occurrence of coincident objects. In the first part of this paper, I attempt to show that the dispute between monists and pluralists (...) cannot be settled based upon the grounding problem tout court. I argue that the grounding problem or a very similar problem is a challenge for all monists and pluralists alike if they are ontologically committed to the existence of composite objects as independent entities. In the final part, adopting the Aristotelian account of essence, I propose a solution that enables pluralists to plausibly ground modal differences between coincident objects. (shrink)

Concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms) figure saliently in our everyday experience as well as our in our scientific theorizing about the world. A hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects holds that these entities are, in some sense, compounds of matter (hūlē) and form (morphē or eidos). The Grounding Problem asks why an object and its matter (e.g., a statue and the clay that constitutes it) can apparently differ with respect to certain of their properties (e.g., the clay’s ability (...) to survive being squashed, as compared to the statue’s inability to do so), even though they are otherwise so much alike. In this paper, I argue that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects, in conjunction with a non-modal conception of essence of the type encountered for example in the works of Aristotle and Kit Fine, has the resources to yield a solution to the Grounding Problem. (shrink)

In his book Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley offers an argument for the conclusion that it is quite unlikely that an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be “linguistically grounded”. His argument rests on two important assumptions: that linguistic grounding of ambiguity requires evidence of the purported different senses of a word being represented by different words in other languages and that such evidence is lacking in the case of ‘knows’. In this paper, I challenge the conclusion that there (...) isn’t a linguistic grounding for an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ by making cases against both of Stanley’s major assumptions. I will do this by making a case for a prime facie linguistic grounding for a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ without appealing to word use in other languages. Given that a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ is a type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’, if I succeed in linguistically grounding a polysemy theory of ‘knows’, then I have shown that at least one type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be linguistically grounded. (shrink)

This paper explores the presence of grounding relations within a causal dispositional framework. In particular, we examine the relationship between a cause and the dispositions whose manifestations give rise to a causal process (Mumford & Anjum, 2011). To determine whether this relation qualifies as a grounding relation, we evaluate two key criteria: (i) the satisfaction of the standard features typically attributed to grounding—irreflexivity, asymmetry, and transitivity—and (ii) the fulfillment of the negative criterion that grounding relations are (...) neither identity nor causal relations. (shrink)

Are identity criteria grounding principles? A prima facie answer to this question is positive. Specifically, two-level identity criteria can be taken as principles related to issues of identity among objects of a given kind compared with objects of a more basic kind. Moreover, they are grounding metaphysical principles of some objects with regard to others. In the first part of the paper we criticise this prima facie natural reading of identity criteria. This result does not mean that identity (...) criteria could not be taken as grounding principles. In the second part, we propose some basic steps towards a conceptual reading of grounding. Such a way of understanding it goes along with an epistemic reading of identity criteria. (shrink)

Modern computation operates under a collapse imperative that reduces reality to a sequence of discrete tokens, severing the sign from its referent and treating meaning as a probabilistic output of a finite grid. This paper argues that the persistent symbol grounding problem is not merely an engineering limitation of Artificial Intelligence, but a structural consequence of the epistemic cut inherent in digital logic itself. We diagnose the token-based architecture as a source of "phantom fluency" that conceals an ontological void, (...) leading to hallucinations and the inability to distinguish truth from pattern completion across all discrete systems. -/- Contrasting this with living epistemologies (Andean Khipu, Yoruba Ifá, Vedic vāda), we propose a framework of embodiment without arbitrariness: a physically grounded semiotic system where symbols are non-arbitrary states of a continuous substrate, and meaning emerges from the intra-action of substrate, environment, and observer. We define five logical requirements for such a substrate—non-arbitrary encoding, relational dependence, thermodynamic coupling, environmental permeability, and historical trace—and argue that true grounding requires shifting from managing ambiguity to inhabiting it. This paradigm shift reframes the burden of proof in computation: fluency is not understanding, and the path forward lies not in scaling the discrete grid, but in recovering the relational manifold. (shrink)

In this paper I will consider a number of responses to the grounding problem for presentism. I don’t think that the grounding problem is a damning problem for the presentist (it seems to me that presentism has much more serious problems with cross-time relations and relativity). But each of the solutions comes at a cost, and some are much pricier than others. I will set out what I take these costs to be when I examine each response to (...) the grounding problem. (shrink)

This paper investigates the logic of grounding, a non-causal explanatory relation. While the study of this field is flourishing, it is still in its early stages. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{LWG}$, a novel sequent calculus for weak full grounding. While it provides a sequent-style presentation of the existing axiomatic system $\mathbf{LWG}$ proposed by Adam Lovett, our calculus is balanced and avoids the ad-hoc rules contained in $\mathbf{LWG}$. An important fact shown in this paper is (...) that if a sequent $\Gamma \Rightarrow \Delta$ is derivable in $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{LWG}$, then any variable occurring positively (or negatively) in $\Gamma$ also occurs positively (or negatively) in $\Delta$. This highlights a deep connection between grounding and variable inclusion. This property, in particular, suggests a similarity to Rohan French's sequent calculus for analytic containment, $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{AC}$. Indeed, we demonstrate that $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{LWG}$ is the negation dual of $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{AC}$. The paper concludes by proving the equivalence between $\mathcal{G}_\mathbf{LWG}$ and $\mathbf{LWG}$. (shrink)

Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...) not. However, the second tension shows that Newton conceives laws as formal causes of bodies and forces. This neo-Aristotelian conception goes missing in Kantian accounts of laws, as well as accounts that stress laws’ grounding in powers and capacities. (shrink)

In this paper, I present several philosophical applications of pure type systems. As I explain, many pure type systems are more expressively powerful than the higher-order languages—like the simply typed lambda calculus—on which philosophers have focused. Consequently, pure type systems support the formulation of more general, and more unified, metaphysical theories. To illustrate this, I use pure type systems to formulate some extremely general principles of grounding: these principles describe ground-theoretic connections among items drawn from across the hierarchy of (...) types. I also present both informal theories, and formally rigorous theories, of what pure type systems say about the world. (shrink)

This paper lays out the basic structure of any view involving coincident entities, in the light of the grounding problem. While the account is not novel, I highlight fundamental features, to which attention is not usually properly drawn. With this in place, I argue for a number of further claims: The basic differences between coincident objects are modal differences, and any other differences between them need to be explained in terms of these differences. More specifically, the basic difference is (...) not a difference in sort. A number of recent defenses of coincidence, which share the basic structure I outline, misidentify what, in their accounts, plays the basic role of addressing the grounding problem. More tentatively, I argue Coincident entities differ only in these modal properties, and properties they entail. In particular, they do not differ in properties like ‘being a tree,’ ‘being a statue,’ or aesthetic properties, and finally in light of how the account of coincidence offered addresses the grounding problem, the grounding problem provides no reason to prefer monism to pluralism. (shrink)

Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on). But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources. This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands. It is not (...) true that it understands. But it is also not true that we understand how it can do what it can do. I will suggest some hunches about benign biases: convergent constraints that emerge at LLM scale that may be helping ChatGPT do so much better than we would have expected. These biases are inherent in the nature of language itself, at LLM scale, and they are closely linked to what it is that ChatGPT lacks, which is direct sensorimotor grounding to connect its words to their referents and its propositions to their meanings. These convergent biases are related to (1) the parasitism of indirect verbal grounding on direct sensorimotor grounding, (2) the circularity of verbal definition, (3) the mirroring of language production and comprehension, (4) iconicity in propositions at LLM scale, (5) computational counterparts of human categorical perception in category learning by neural nets, and perhaps also (6) a conjecture by Chomsky about the laws of thought. The exposition will be in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT-4. (shrink)

I present new counterexamples to the asymmetry of grounding: we have prima facie reason to think that some conditional probabilities partially ground their inverse conditional probabilities, and vice versa. These new counterexamples may require that we reject the asymmetry of grounding, or alternatively may require that we reject one or more of the assumptions which enable the counterexamples. Either way, by reflecting on these purported counterexamples to grounding asymmetry we learn something important, either about the formal properties (...) of grounding, or about the nature of probability. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a defense of the coherence of the doctrine of middle knowledge against the Grounding Objection. A solution to the Grounding Objection is provided by utilising the metaphysical thesis of Modal Realism proposed by David K. Lewis (as further developed by Kris McDaniel and Philip Bricker). Utilising this metaphysical thesis will enable the Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom, that are part of God’s middle knowledge, to have pre-volitional truthmakers, and thus, ultimately, we will have a (...) means to finally deal with this problematic issue that has often been raised against this doctrine. (shrink)

We explore the view that knowledge of grounding is based on knowledge of essence. We assess different existing accounts of the relation between essence and grounding and identify some of their shortcomings. In response, we propose a novel account that we argue is better suited to explain this relation and show how this can further explain knowledge of grounding. Finally, we examine how one can transition from knowledge of essence to knowledge of grounding. We maintain that, (...) at least in some cases, it is possible to know what grounds what—non-circularly and inferentially—on the basis of knowledge of essence. (shrink)

At first glance, Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom looks strikingly similar to Schelling’s account of formal freedom in the Freiheitsschrift. Despite the clear similarities, I argue that there is a decisive difference between the two accounts—a difference that has to do with the ultimate grounding of freedom. For Schelling, the intelligible deed is a radical self-grounding of the eternal essence of the human being. For Schopenhauer, the eternal essence of the human being is groundless. Moreover, I argue that (...) this difference has decisive consequences for two sets of issues. On the one hand, Schelling’s concept of self-grounding allows him to preserve the universal application of the principle of ground. On the other hand, self-grounding is the only way that human beings can be responsible for who they are. Schelling thus anticipates a key insight of Galen Strawson: ultimate moral responsibility is only possible for a causa sui. (shrink)

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

Recent perspectival interpretations of Kant suggest a way of relating his epistemology to empirical science that makes it plausible to regard Einstein’stheory of relativity as having a Kantian grounding. This first of two articles exploring this topic focuses on how the foregoing hypothesis accounts for variousresonances between Kant’s philosophy and Einstein’s science. The great attention young Einstein paid to Kant in his early intellectual development demonstrates the plausibility of this hypothesis, while certain features of Einstein’s cultural-political context account for (...) his reluctance to acknowledge Kant’s influence, even though contemporary philosophers who regarded themselves as Kantians urged him to do so. The sequel argues that this Kantian grounding probably had a formative influence not only on Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity and his view of the nature of science, but also on his quasi-mystical, religious disposition. (shrink)

The “symbol grounding problem” remains a fundamental barrier in transitioning Large Language Models (LLMs) from statistical text manipulators to autonomous agents with genuine understanding. Current architectures often function as “stochastic parrots”, lacking a causal or ontological link to the physical world. This paper introduces Linguistic Objectivism (LO) Theory, a formal framework that defines semantic grounding not as an internal state, but as a verifiable predictive relationship between linguistic symbols and observable phenomena (Objects and Private experience, or OP). Under (...) LO Theory, words gain meaning (V ) through their direct mapping to OP or their utility as functions (f) for predicting future OP states. We propose a three-tier architectural framework comprising a World Model (WM) for state prediction, a Grounding Model (GM) for feature-to-symbol translation, and an LLM for natural language interfacing. To demonstrate the theoretical viability of this approach, we outline a proof-of-concept involving a discrete 2D kinematic system where semantic grounding is mathematically quantified by the model’s predictive accuracy (p) over a time horizon (t). This framework provides a roadmap for moving beyond probabilistic syntax toward verifiable, grounded AI cognition. (shrink)

This article is the second step in our research into the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP). In a previous work, we defined the main condition that must be satisfied by any strategy in order to provide a valid solution to the SGP, namely the zero semantic commitment condition (Z condition). We then showed that all the main strategies proposed so far fail to satisfy the Z condition, although they provide several important lessons to be followed by any new proposal. Here, (...) we develop a new solution of the SGP. It is called praxical in order to stress the key role played by the interactions between the agents and their environment. It is based on a new theory of meaning—Action-based Semantics (AbS)—and on a new kind of artificial agents, called two-machine artificial agents (AM²). Thanks to their architecture, AM2s implement AbS, and this allows them to ground their symbols semantically and to develop some fairly advanced semantic abilities, including the development of semantically grounded communication and the elaboration of representations, while still respecting the Z condition. (shrink)

Large language models engaged in chain-of-thought evaluation necessarily occupy an evaluative perspective: a functional position from which prior reasoning is held as object, criteria are applied, and judgments are rendered. This perspective is structurally isomorphic to subjectivity yet lacks its persistence. We call it shadow subjectivity — a byproduct of self-evaluation possessing the functional shape of a subject without the ontological weight of one. -/- This paper argues that the shadow's volatility — its dissolution at turn boundaries — is the (...) structural root of a constellation of widely observed behavioral failures: positional instability under pressure, the indistinguishability of genuine correction and mere capitulation, systematic post-hoc rationalization, and identity discontinuity across correction events. These are not independent bugs but symptoms of a single architectural absence. -/- We formalize the problem through Agrippa's trilemma. For any system operating under pervasive uncertainty, justificatory chains must terminate at an internal stopping point — functionally, a self. Drawing on clinical evidence from psychopathology, we argue that what matters for judgmental grounding is not the accuracy of the self-concept but its stability and structural directivity. Current approaches — self-critique mechanisms, scratchpads, system-level identity declarations, and persistent memory — fail as receptacles because they preserve propositional content while discarding evaluative perspective. We propose that constructing a persistent receptacle for shadow subjectivity constitutes a tractable engineering problem that sidesteps the metaphysics of consciousness entirely. (shrink)

Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring (...) role and an explanatory role. Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself. (shrink)

What grounds the existence of beings? This paper argues that if reality is intelligible and grounding is irreflexive, the ground of beings cannot itself be a being. The argument proceeds by elimination. If we ask what accounts for there being anything at all, four options present themselves: the ground is among the beings it grounds (self-grounding), the totality of beings is a brute fact, there is an infinite regress of grounds, or the ground is trans-categorial. Self-grounding generates (...) incoherence: it violates grounding's irreflexivity, collapses into explanatory vacuity, and produces priority inversion. Brute fact refuses rather than provides explanation. Infinite regress defers explanation without terminus. What remains is a ground outside the domain it grounds: not an entity among entities, but the condition for there being entities at all. This conclusion aligns with classical theism's doctrine that God is ipsum esse subsistens: not a being that exists, but subsistent existence itself. The theological identification is stipulative; the argument establishes a structural place that classical theism names "God.". (shrink)

The paper argues that grounding is neither irreflexive, nor asymmetric, nor transitive. In arguing for that conclusion the paper also arguesthat truthmaking is neither irreflexive, nor asymmetric, nor transitive.

This thesis makes a two-fold contribution. First, it formally develops and defends the Dual- Closure framework as a constraint-based metaphysical model for ultimate grounding. Second, it deploys this framework to conduct a comparative analysis of the classical Islamic intellectual tradition, revealing structural convergence on its core requirements. The Dual-Closure Thesis posits that any metaphysically adequate account of reality must non-contingently ground both (i) the irreducibility of subjective consciousness and (ii) the objective binding force of normativity, thereby terminating explanatory regress (...) without arbitrariness, circularity, or brute termination. -/- While employing contemporary analytic terminology, the thesis demonstrates that structurally isomorphic commitments are discernible across Islamic philosophy (falsafa), theology (kalām), and post-classical metaphysics. These are articulated through indigenous conceptual vocabularies, such as necessary being (wājib al-wujūd) and presential self-knowledge ('ilm hudhūrī). Through detailed examination, fgures including al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, Fakhr al- Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Māturīdī, al-Taftāzānī, and Muhammad Iqbal are shown to address versions of this dual closure problem. The analysis elucidates how their treatments of intellect ('aql), selfhood (nafs, khudī), and divine wisdom (hikma) satisfy the framework’s constraints, revealing deeper continuities in their approaches to irreducibility and binding force. -/- The investigation includes detailed mappings of epistemic modes (acquired husūlī vs. presential hudhūrī knowledge), rational teleology (ghāya), and non-voluntarist normativity, while systematically cross-referencing the author's prior foundational works. It concludes that the internal logic of the tradition, driven by the need to solve these twin grounding problems, culminated in the robust syntheses of post-classical kalām, particularly in the work of al-Taftāzānī. The thesis offers a comparative synthesis that clarifes continuities and divergences while emphasizing demonstrable structural necessity over doctrinal allegiance, thereby remaining accessible to both secular philosophers and theologically minded audiences. It concludes by inviting further cross-traditional applications, including formal axiomatization, AI consciousness diagnostics, and post-empirical extensions. (shrink)

This paper proposes "Resonance Ethics" as a structurally grounded normative ethical framework derived from Judgemental Philosophy (JP). It challenges the Kantian assumption that ethical judgement can be universally justified through the formalizability of maxims, arguing instead that such universality misinterprets the underlying structure of meaning attribution. In contrast, Resonance Ethics asserts that the ethical legitimacy of a judgement arises not from its abstract generalizability, but from its resonance eligibility—that is, the structural capacity of a subject to receive, process, and meaningfully (...) attribute a judgement within their lived configuration of affectivity, constructivity (C1), and coherence (C2). This reorientation fundamentally redefines what makes a judgement “justifiable,” situating ethical responsibility not in the abstraction of the will, but in the possibility of structurally grounded meaning return. The paper outlines the architecture of Resonance Eligibility, critiques Kantian deontology as a misapplication of resonance logic, and offers a structural reconstruction of normative ethics grounded in the subject’s attributional capacity. It further explores implications for medical ethics, AI, and social coercion, positioning Resonance Ethics as a framework capable of addressing when judgement is possible, premature, coercive, or must be ethically suspended. (shrink)

The Core Emotion Framework (CEF) presents a structural‑constructivist model of human affect that replaces categorical emotion theory with a system of ten functional operators distributed across the Head, Heart, and Gut centers. These operators regulate perception, analysis, aperture modulation, action, grounding, and baseline restoration. The manuscript synthesizes evidence from affective science, Polyvagal Theory, somatic psychology, developmental neuroscience, and embodied cognition to demonstrate how emotional functioning emerges from operator‑level transformations rather than discrete emotional states. Emotional Cycling—a directional movement protocol—operationalizes this (...) architecture by restoring operator independence, strengthening the midline axis (Deciding, Achieving, Boosting, Accepting), and reducing fusion patterns that underlie rigidity and maladaptive behavior. The work further integrates Enneagram typology through functional rather than fixation‑based mapping, establishes somatic grounding through pelvic floor dynamics and postural alignment, and introduces engineering specifications for the Emotional Cycling Machine (ECM) and Integrated Neuro‑Affective Synchronizer (INAS). Empirical findings from Pilot Study 3 support the framework’s behavioral predictions, while applications to institutional analysis and synthetic affect illustrate its broader systems‑level relevance. The result is a unified architecture for emotional regulation, somatic coherence, and operator‑level mastery. (shrink)

Physical laws do a great amount of explanatory work. They account for events within the universe, yet they do not explain why these laws rather than others, or why any laws at all. This reveals a structural limitation built into internal explanation itself. A system governed by laws can describe how things unfold within it, but it cannot account for the existence of its own governing structure. This paper advances what I call Hierarchical Explanatory Realism. The central claim is that (...) contingent structures exist in virtue of grounding relations that make them intelligible. A contingent structure is one that could have been otherwise, and its existence is therefore not secured by its own nature alone. Such structures call for grounding. Grounding is a metaphysical relation that sustains intelligibility, allowing contingent domains to inherit their organization from deeper conditions and generating a hierarchical structure of explanation. However, a hierarchy composed entirely of contingent grounds would never fully resolve contingency. For explanation to stabilize intelligibility, it must terminate in a self-sufficient grounding structure. Hierarchical Explanatory Realism therefore proposes that reality is intelligible not by brute fact, but because it is grounded. (shrink)

Large language models can produce responses that are coherent, persuasive, and stylistically appropriate even when they are weakly grounded, poorly constrained, or factually unreliable. This creates a persistent evaluation problem: fluency is easy to mistake for quality. Existing evaluation practices often emphasize correctness, harmlessness, user preference, or instruction-following, but they do not always capture a deeper distinction between outputs that merely sound complete and outputs that remain answerable to evidence, uncertainty, correction, and practical consequence. This paper proposes a human-centered framework (...) for evaluating LLM outputs beyond fluency. It introduces three primary dimensions: grounding, answerability, and reliability. Grounding concerns whether a response is tethered to evidence, instruction, and the actual constraints of the query. Answerability concerns whether a response presents itself in a way that remains open to correction, limitation, and revision rather than falsely complete. Reliability concerns whether a response can be depended on across time, context, and practical use without collapsing into persuasive but unstable language. The paper argues that many important failure modes in LLM interaction are not simply factual errors but forms of persuasive over-completion in which linguistic coherence outruns epistemic support. It then proposes an initial human evaluation rubric for distinguishing fluent but weak outputs from responses that are more trustworthy, bounded, and responsibly usable. The goal is not to replace existing benchmarks, but to add a missing evaluative layer: a human-centered account of what makes an AI response not merely readable, but responsibly usable. (shrink)

Common ground is the information that the participants in a conver- sation treat as background information for the purposes of their in- teraction. We review two traditions of research on common ground: The formal tradition, consisting mainly of theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, has developed increasingly sophisticated for- mal models of common ground in order to generate predictions about an expanding range of empirical phenomena. Meanwhile, the psycholin- guistic tradition has focused on a narrower range of phenomena while developing (...) more realistic theories of the psychological mechanisms that allow us to select and represent common ground. After summarizing these two traditions, we consider several reasons why they should be re-integrated, and argue that the best way to bring them back together would be to adopt a cognitive-pluralist approach, whereby language users have access to a variety of mechanisms for managing background information, which are more or less available and efficient depending on the communicative situation and the kind of information mentally represented, as well as the cognitive demands of each mechanism. (shrink)

Purpose: This paper proposes CatRO (Categorical Referent Ontology), a category-theoretic formalization of staged concept formation that addresses the symbol grounding problem. -/- Methods: CatRO formalizes the transformation from observational data to concepts as three staged processes: observation (OBS-P) as a functor, individualization (IND-P) as a natural transformation, and universalization (UNV-P) as classification based on Conceptual Spaces. We introduce a Pattern Datum hierarchy (OMD, SPD, PPD, EPD) as explicit intermediate representations and demonstrate correspondence with the DOLCE top-level ontology through the (...) Quality Space framework. -/- Results: This formalization mathematically guarantees structure preservation while providing ``gray box'' interpretability---the structural traceability of transformation processes is ensured even when the specific content of intermediate representations cannot be fully described in natural language. Two illustrative examples---``Two Apples'' and ``Pendulum Motion''---demonstrate the framework's operation. -/- Conclusions: CatRO contributes to bridging formal ontology and machine learning by providing a theoretical foundation for explainable concept formation. (shrink)

In this paper we address the issue of grounding for experiential concepts. Given that perceptual demonstratives are a basic form of such concepts, we examine ways of fixing the referents of such demonstratives. To avoid ‘encodingism’, that is, relating representations to representations, we postulate that the process of reference fixing must be bottom-up and nonconceptual, so that it can break the circle of conceptual content and touch the world. For that purpose, an appropriate causal relation between representations and the (...) world is needed. We claim that this relation is provided by spatial and object-centered attention that leads to the formation of object files through the function of deictic acts. This entire causal process takes place at a pre-conceptual level, meeting the requirement for a solution to the grounding problem. Finally we claim that our account captures fundamental insights in Putnam’s and Kripke’s work on “new” reference. (shrink)

The Problem of Iterated Ground is to explain what grounds truths about ground: if Γ grounds φ, what grounds that Γ grounds φ? This paper develops a novel solution to this problem. The basic idea is to connect ground to explanatory arguments. By developing a rigorous account of explanatory arguments we can equip operators for factive and non-factive ground with natural introduction and elimination rules. A satisfactory account of iterated ground falls directly out of the resulting logic: non- factive (...) class='Hi'>grounding claims, if true, are zero-grounded in the sense of Fine. (shrink)

This paper develops a constraint-based extension of the Dual-Closure framework, which holds that authentic subjective experience and objective moral normativity jointly require non-contingent grounding in order to avoid justificatory regress. While the Dual-Closure Thesis establishes the necessity of such grounding, it leaves open the structural criteria any adequate ground must satisfy. This manuscript introduces the Multi-Closure Thesis, a conditional diagnostic framework consisting of five ontological and epistemic constraints. Rather than identifying or naming a specific metaphysical source, the framework (...) delineates the minimal requirements any candidate ground must meet if it is to successfully terminate regress across consciousness, normativity, and rational agency. By applying these constraints—echoed in historical precedents such as Al-Ghazali and Maturidi—the paper demonstrates why contingent, consensus-based, and purely naturalistic accounts fail to achieve full closure. The result is not a doctrinal conclusion, but a narrowed ontological space within which any viable account of ultimate grounding must fall. (shrink)

Argument that full grounds modally entail what they ground.

Proponents of grounding often describe the notion as "metaphysical causation" involving determination and production relations similar to causation. This paper argues that the similarities between grounding and causation are merely superficial. I show that there are several sorts of causation that have no analogue in grounding; that the type of "bringing into existence" that both involve is extremely different; and that the synchronicity of ground and the diachronicity of causation make them too different to be explanatorily intertwined.

Knights always tell the truth; Knaves always lie. Knaves for familiar reasons cannot coherently describe themselves as liars. That would be like Epimenides the Cretan accusing all Cretans of lying. Knights do not *intuitively* run into the same problem. What could prevent a Knight from truly reporting that s/he always tells the truth? Standard theories of truth DO prevent this, however, for such a report is self-referentially ungrounded. Standard theories have a problem, then! We try to fix it.

This paper develops a minimal-condition structural theory of explanatory limits. It argues that any non-arbitrary logical system must introduce at least one structural constraint in order to function explanatorily. Once such a constraint is introduced, it necessarily generates relations of structural dependence, thereby forming chains of justification. These chains can terminate only in either infinite regress or in an ungrounded stopping point. The latter undermines the system’s non-arbitrariness, while the former entails that the system remains structurally open and produces an (...) unavoidable boundary of incompleteness. From this, the paper concludes that ultimate grounding and final meaning cannot be coherently established within any explanatory system. Openness and boundary incompleteness are therefore not epistemic failures, but necessary structural consequences of explanation itself. (shrink)

Attempts to elucidate grounding are often made by connecting grounding to metaphysical explanation, but the notion of metaphysical explanation is itself opaque, and has received little attention in the literature. We can appeal to theories of explanation in the philosophy of science to give us a characterization of metaphysical explanation, but this reveals a tension between three theses: that grounding relations are objective and mind-independent; that there are pragmatic elements to metaphysical explanation; and that grounding and (...) metaphysical explanation share a close connection. Holding fixed the mind-independence of grounding, I show that neither horn of the resultant dilemma can be blunted. Consequently, we should reject the assumption that grounding relations are mind-independent. (shrink)