Ground s’enfronta al xoc de l’art contemporani plantejant, a manera de reflexió filosòfica, aquelles preguntes «grolleres» que semblaven confinades en la resposta de l’home del carrer o del crític reaccionari: no és una xorrada aquesta pila de rajoles al museu? No obstant això, la seua intenció no és fer-nos prendre partit a favor o en contra de determinades obres d’art del Minimal o del Conceptual. El que batega al fons del llibre de Ground és una defensa de l’art contemporani quan (...) reivindica la seua intel·ligibilitat com un tret centralment constitutiu d’aquest. Una defensa que passa, necessàriament, per mantenir en peus la vigència de la pregunta que dóna títol al llibre, a pesar dels intents recents per anul·lar-la o per relegar-la a una desautorització ingenuista i/o reaccionària de «tot» l’art contemporani. (shrink)

El text d’Ian Ground la traducció del qual transcrivim a continuació va ser llegit a l’acte de presentación del seu llibre ¿Arte o chorrada? (València, Publicacions de la Universitat de València / Col•lecció Estètica & Crítica, 2008) el dia 9 de juny de 2008 a l’Aula Magna de l’edifici del Carrer La Nau de la Universitat de València, amb la presència, a més d’Ian Ground, de Romà de la Calle (en qualitat de Director de la col•lecció Estètica & Crítica) i (...) de mi mateix, Salvador Rubio (en qualitat de traductor, editor i autor de la introducció del llibre). El text va ser llegit en anglés pel seu autor, alternat, paràgraf per paràgraf, amb la lectura de la traducció castellana. Hem preferit que el text traduit aparega ací en castellà, exactament igual al que va ser llegit a l’esmentat acte de presentació. La reflexió que ens proposa Ian Ground, en cara que específicament concebuda per a aquest acte, no necessita cap presentació i pot ser llegida perfectament com un text autònom. Tanmateix, em permet precedir-la amb unes quantes observacions que no pretenen sustituir les meues paraules a l’acte (on, naturalment, els agraïments eren els protagonistes) ni tampoc la introducció del llibre ja publicada, i a la qual es pot remetre directament el lector d’aquest article. (shrink)

Cora Diamond’s discussions of the ethics of our treatment of animals offer a critique of conceptions of morality which regard our ethical responses as founded on reasons which ought to be reasons for anyone. Diamond takes issue with accounts of our treatment of animals based on their possession of capacities which are shared with us. She offers instead a concept of the moral life, as a form of life—inherited, shared and negotiated—only within which can moral reasons count as reasons at (...) all. Our fellow creatures have some share in this life, but one that must be recognized as partial and problematic.In this discussion, we offer an account which is consistent with Diamond’s general perspective. But one which also offers a more generous account of ways in which the discoveries of the ethological sciences dynamically reshape the place of animals in our shared moral life. (shrink)

Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environ- mental Aesthetics. Edited by ARNOLD BERLEANT . Ashgate. 2002. pp. 192. C ONSISTING of twelve chapters, and an extended introduction, this volume provides a leading-edge anthology of reflections on environmental aesthetics.

Cavell writes about opera as a medium in which the sceptical threat to the meaning of what we say is rescued by music. Curiously, despite passing references to Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte escaped his direct attention. Yet of all the three Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations, it is Cosi which most intricately examines Cavellian themes of scepticism, sincerity and alienation as well as, notoriously, deploying incongruities between voice, action and music in pursuit of its ethical purpose. (...) Moreover, the opera features a philosopher in active pursuit of a project to “epistemologize” human relationships and, in more recent years, has attracted direct philosophical inquiry. In this essay, I argue that Cosi fan tutte is the most Cavellian of operas and a fitting arena in which to test Cavell’s thought against rival accounts of his central themes. (shrink)

Must We Mean What We Play? INTRODUCTION It was Sir Thomas Beecham who said,'The English do not care for music-but they love the noise it makes.'Sir Thomas was, of course, given to making acerbic swipes but this one has always seemed to me to have.

We hypothesise that the sarcolemma of an actively growing myofibre has different properties to the sarcolemma of a mature adult myofibre. Such fundamentally different properties have clinical consequences for the onset, and potential therapeutic targets, of various skeletal muscle diseases that first manifest either during childhood (e.g. Duchenne muscular dystrophy, DMD) or after cessation of the main growth phase (e.g. dysferlinopathies). These characteristics are also relevant to the selection of both tissue culture and in vivo models employed to study such (...) myopathies and the molecular regulation of adult myofibres. During growth, multinucleated myofibres increase enormously in size and volume with dramatic increases in length (up to ∼600 mm). This is in striking contrast with most mononucleated cells such as fibroblasts, that remain at a relatively small size (∼10–20 µm diameter). The consequences of a dynamic, expanding sarcolemma during growth, compared with that of an adult myofibre of a fixed length, are discussed with respect to various aspects of muscle biology. (shrink)

ED455370 - Lifelong Learning, Equity and Inclusion. Proceedings [of the] UACE Conference (Cambridge, England, March 29-31, 1999).

This rich, subtle and hugely ambitious book might also have been called “why (and how) metaphysics matters”. Cooper's themes are the tensions implicit in the relation of contingent human beings to the world and the implications of those tensions, and of putative means of their.

This book brings together disparate strands of ToM research, lays out historical roots of the idea, and indicates better alternatives.

身のまわりの卑近な事柄を根本から考え直してみたい。そんな欲求が人々の心をとらえている。看護する自分に、哲学はそのための力を与えてくれるだろうか。知識・科学・心・モラルといった主題にそって看護の主要な問 題をとりあげ、哲学ならではの思索の道筋を示す。「考える看護」の面白さが実感できる「ナースのための哲学入門」。.

Extreme loss of skeletal muscle mass (atrophy) occurs in human muscles that are not used. In striking contrast, skeletal muscles do not rapidly waste away in hibernating mammals such as bears, or aestivating frogs, subjected to many months of inactivity and starvation. What factors regulate skeletal muscle mass and what mechanisms protect against muscle atrophy in some species? Severe atrophy also occurs with ageing and there is much clinical interest in reducing such loss of muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia). In (...) the meat industry, a key aim is optimizing the control of skeletal muscle growth and meat quality. The impaired response of muscle to insulin resulting in diabetes, that is a consequence of the metabolic impact of increasing obesity and fat deposition in humans, is also of increasing clinical concern. Intensive research in these fields, combined with mouse models, is reviewed with respect to the molecular control of muscle growth (myogenesis) and atrophy/hypertrophy and fat deposition (adipogenesis) in skeletal muscle, with a focus on IGF‐1/insulin signaling. BioEssays 28: 994–1009, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex linguistic tasks has sparked debate about their capabilities. Unlike humans, these models learn language solely from textual data without directly interacting with the world. Yet they generate seemingly meaningful text on diverse topics. This achievement has renewed interest in the classical `Symbol Grounding Problem' -- the question of whether the internal representations and outputs of symbolic AI systems can possess intrinsic meaning that is not parasitic on external interpretation. Although (...) modern LLMs compute over vectors rather than symbols, an analogous problem arises for these systems, which we call the Vector Grounding Problem. This paper has two main goals. First, we distinguish five main notions of grounding that are often conflated in the literature, and argue that only one of them, which we call referential grounding, is relevant to the Vector Grounding Problem. Second, drawing on philosophical theories of representational content, we provide two arguments for the claim that LLMs and related systems can achieve referential grounding: (1) through preference fine-tuning methods that explicitly establish world-involving functions, and (2) through pre-training alone, which in limited domains may select for internal states with world-involving content, as mechanistic interpretability research suggests. Through these pathways, LLMs can establish connections to the world sufficient for intrinsic meaning. One potentially surprising implication of our discussion is that that multimodality and embodiment are neither necessary nor sufficient to overcome the Grounding Problem. *Note: this is an updated and improved version of the preprint originally made available on ArXiv in 2023.*. (shrink)

Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with (...) antecedently plausible principles governing grounding, essence, and identity taken individually, and illuminates how the three interact. We also argue that the account compares favorably to an alternative unification of grounding and essence recently proposed by Kit Fine. (shrink)

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie (...) counterexamples. First, some physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length. (shrink)

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does (...) not know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

This paper outlines a non-reductive counterfactual account of grounding along interventionist lines, and uses the account to argue that taking grounding seriously requires ascribing non-trivial truth-conditions to a range of counterpossible counterfactuals. This result allows for a diagnosis of a route to scepticism about grounding, as deriving at least in part from scepticism about non-trivial counterpossible truth and falsity.

Some propositions are true, and it is true that some propositions are true. Each of these facts looks like an impeccable ground of the other. But they cannot both ground each other, since grounding is asymmetric. This paper explores two new diagnoses of this much discussed puzzle. The tools of higher-order logic are used to show how both diagnoses can be fleshed out into strong and consistent theories of grounding. These theories of grounding in turn demand new (...) theories of the granularity of propositions, properties, and relations. Even those who are uninterested in grounding should take seriously these pictures of reality’s logical structure, which are in many ways reminiscent of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s logical atomism. (shrink)

According to the governing conception of the laws of nature, laws, in some sense, determine concrete goings-on. Just how to understand the sort of determination at play in governance is, however, a substantial question. One potential answer to this question, which has recently received some attention, is that laws govern by grounding what happens in the concrete world. If this account succeeded, it would show that governance can be understood in terms of an independently motivated and widely accepted notion. (...) Thus far, though, the grounding conception of governance has not been developed or evaluated in detail. In this paper, I fill this gap by mapping out and evaluating various possible ways of developing this conception of governance. My main conclusion is that the grounding conception runs into serious difficulties in trying to capture the key idea that governing laws determine the distribution of fundamental property instances. (shrink)

The concept of grounding - of a fact obtaining in virtue of other facts - has been a topic of intensive philosophical and logical investigation over roughly the past two decades. Many philosophers take grounding to deserve a central place in metaphysical theorizing, in great part because it is thought to do a better job than other concepts - for example, reduction and supervenience - at capturing certain phenomena. Studies on the logic of grounding have largely been (...) conducted with this philosophical background in mind. In this Element, the author tries to give a faithful picture of the contemporary development of the logic of grounding in a way that is both reasonably comprehensive and reasonably systematic. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) produce seemingly meaningful outputs, yet they are trained on text alone without direct interaction with the world. This leads to a modern variant of the classical symbol grounding problem in AI: can LLMs' internal states and outputs be about extra-linguistic reality, independently of the meaning human interpreters project onto them? We argue that they can. We first distinguish referential grounding—the connection between a representation and its worldly referent—from other forms of grounding and argue (...) it is the only kind essential to solving the problem. We contend that referential grounding is achieved when a system's internal states satisfy two conditions derived from teleosemantic theories of representation: (1) they stand in appropriate causal-informational relations to the world, and (2) they have a history of selection that has endowed them with the function of carrying this information. We argue that LLMs can meet both conditions, even without multimodality or embodiment. (shrink)

In this paper, I clarify the relation between two types of grounding: metaphysical and conceptual. Metaphysical grounding relates entities at more and less fundamental ontological levels. Conceptual grounding relates semantically primitive sentences and semantically derivative sentences. It is important to distinguish these relations given that both types of grounding can underwrite non-causal “in-virtue-of” claims. In this paper, I argue that conceptual and metaphysical grounding are exclusive: if a given in-virtue-of claim involves conceptual grounding, then (...) it does not involve metaphysical grounding. I then present two heuristics for deciding which type of grounding is relevant to a given case. These heuristics suggest that certain proposed cases of metaphysical grounding may not actually involve metaphysical grounding at all. (shrink)

Many have been tempted to invoke a primitive notion of grounding to describe the way in which some features of reality give rise to others. Jessica Wilson argues that such a notion is unnecessary to describe the structure of the world: that we can make do with specific dependence relations such as the part–whole relation or the determinate–determinable relation, together with a notion of absolute fundamentality. In this paper I argue that such resources are inadequate to describe the particular (...) ways in which some parts of reality give rise to others, and thus that we do in fact need grounding. (shrink)

In his insightful and challenging paper, Jonathan Schaffer argues against a distinction I make in The Ant Trap (Epstein 2015) and related articles. I argue that in addition to the widely discussed “grounding” relation, there is a different kind of metaphysical determination I name “anchoring.” Grounding and anchoring are distinct, and both need to be a part of full explanations of how facts are metaphysically determined. Schaffer argues instead that anchoring is a species of grounding. The crux (...) of his argument comes in the last sections of his paper, in his discussion of “exportation,” the relations strategy, and the definitions strategy. I am inclined to agree that Schaffer’s interesting strategies offer the best choices for the philosopher who wants to insist that anchoring is a species of grounding. But both, I will argue, are fatally flawed. I do not take the separation of anchors from grounds lightly, but find the evidence in its favor overwhelming. And once the distinction is made, I find anchoring to be a powerful practical tool in metaphysics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 768-781, November 2019. (shrink)

Metaphysical rationalism is the view that, necessarily, every fact that stands in need of a metaphysical (grounding) explanation has one. Varieties of metaphysical rationalism include classical theism, Spinozism, spacetime priority monism, and axiarchism. Grounding indeterminism is the view that the same ground, in precisely the same circumstances, might not have grounded what it in fact grounds. I argue that a plausible defense of any form of metaphysical rationalism requires a commitment to grounding indeterminism.

This paper presents a novel challenge for the panpsychist solution to the problem of consciousness. It advances three main claims. First, that the problem of consciousness is really an instance of a more general problem: that of grounding the qualitative. Second, that we should want a general solution to this problem. Third, that panpsychism cannot provide it. I also suggest two further things: (1) that alternative kinds of Russellian monism may avoid the problem in ways panpsychists cannot, and (2) (...) that a kind of neo-Aristotelian or ground-theoretical physicalism fares just as well here if not better. (shrink)

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that (...) class='Hi'>grounding claims do entail corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the "reference type problem": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence. (shrink)

Kant claims that his moral arguments for faith in God’s existence secure faith in a being with traditional divine properties including omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. However, it is unclear how Kant’s moral arguments attain this result. This paper presents a new interpretation of Kant’s moral arguments, the ‘grounding interpretation,’ which shows why moral faith concerns a being with the traditional divine omni-properties. It argues for a connection between moral faith and a metaphysical conception of God as the ground of (...) possibility. While that conception has previously been associated with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Kant’s moral arguments supply it with both a practical justification and a practical interpretation. Recognizing this point enables us to understand why Kant holds that the God of moral faith has the traditional divine properties. (shrink)