Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

A standard move to defend the intelligibility of ground in contemporary metaphysics is to argue that metaphysical explanations of a constitutive type guide us to its nature. Proponents of this approach attempt to defend instances of an argument that Skiles and Trogdon (2021) have recently called inheritance: It is because constitutive cases of metaphysical explanation display such-and-such features that we should regard grounding as having so-and-so properties. However, an unnoticed problem hinders the success of the strategy. Many putative instances of inheritance are not scientifically motivated. Therefore, they would not give naturalistic metaphysicians compelling reasons to accept ground in their toolkit. We believe this problem should be avoided since ground is a highly serviceable tool for investigating metaphysical areas of science. To this end we defend scientific inheritance, a naturalistic version of the inheritance view that takes constitutive scientific explanation as a better guide to ground. After illustrating the strategy and its merits, we answer two objections that our detractor may raise.