Work in Progress and Manuscripts (Titles redacted for blind review; e-mail for the paper)
A paper on grounding laws (with Derek Haderlie).
I develop an account of what the laws of ground are and put it to the following uses: giving an account of the unity of ground; giving an account of what grounds ground; giving a solution to the connection problem; giving an account of the explanatory role of moral principles; giving an account of Purity; giving an account of the connection between essence and ground.
A theory of real definition
I attempt to develop an account of real immediate definition. Reversing the usual order of explanation I then use this account of real definition to characterize the notion of essence.
A paper about the subject matter of general propositions
In truthmaker semantics the subject matter of a proposition is taken to be a single state – the fusion of all the truthmakers and falsemakers of the proposition. This account works beautifully for the truth-functional operations but breaks down for quantified propositions. The account incorrectly predicts that the proposition that someone is wise is partly about Socrates. In this talk I develop a novel account of subject matter that can account for the subject matter of quantified propositions. The basic idea is that the subject matter of a proposition is taken to a collection of states – the subject matter of the proposition should be thought of as what is common to those states
A paper on how propositional constituents are defined in terms of how they are grounded
A paper on truthmakers for modal propositions
A paper on the grounds for conditionals
I develop an account of the immediate full grounds for conditionals. The key idea behind the approach lies in defining what it is to subtract the grounds for the antecedent from the grounds for the consequent. The grounds for the conditional are, roughly, the results of such subtractions. This thus shows how to generalize Fine’s and Yablo’s ideas about the incremental conditional from the setting of truthmaker theory to a grounding framework. I then argue that propositions that have the form of theorems of intuitionistic propositional logic are all zero-grounded.