BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//Grails iCalendar plugin//NONSGML Grails iCalendar plugin//EN VERSION:2.0 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260604T213635Z DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20140605T050000 DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20140605T053000 SUMMARY:Grounding the Unreal UID:20260606T183640Z-iCalPlugin-Grails@philevents-web-bd7db559-gt5qm TZID:America/Toronto LOCATION:Oslo\, Norway DESCRIPTION:

The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a
picture on which our scientific theories exhibit a layered
structure of dependence and determination.  \;Economics is dependent
on and determined by psychology\; psychology in its turn is\,
plausibly\, dependent on and determined by biology\; and so it goes.
It is tempting to explain this layered structure of dependence and
determination among our theories by appeal to a corresponding
layered structure of dependence and determination among the
entities putatively treated by those theories.  \;In this paper\, I
argue that we can resist this temptation: we can explain the sense
in which\, \\eg{}\, the biological truths are dependent on and
determined by chemical truths without appealing to properly
biological or chemical entities.  \;This opens the door to a view on
which\, though there are more truths than just the purely physical
truths\, there are no entities\, states\, or properties other than
the purely physical entities\, states\, and properties.  \;I argue
that some familiar strategies to explicate the idea of a layered
structure of theories by appeal to reduction\, ground\, and
truthmaking encounter difficulties.  \;I then show how these
difficulties point the way to a more satisfactory treatment which
appeals to something very close to the notion of ground.  \;Finally\,
I show how this treatment provides a theoretical setting in which
we might fruitfully frame debates about which entities there
really are.

ORGANIZER;CN=Jon Erling Litland: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR