Abstract The notion of grounding is usually conceived as an objective and explanatory relation. It connects two relata if one—the ground—determines or explains the other—the consequence. In the contemporary literature on grounding, much effort has been devoted to logically characterize the formal aspects of grounding, but a major hard problem remains: defining suitable grounding principles for universal and existential formulae. Indeed, several grounding principles for […]

Abstract Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due to Halpern & […]

Abstract The best-known syntactic account of the logical constants is inferentialism . Following Wittgenstein’s thought that meaning is use, inferentialists argue that meanings of expressions are given by introduction and elimination rules. This is especially plausible for the logical constants, where standard presentations divide inference rules in just this way. But not just any rules will do, as we’ve learnt from Prior’s famous example of tonk, and the usual extra […]

Abstract In debates about the metaphysics of material objects examples of colocated objects are commonly taken to be examples of coincidence too. But the argument that colocation is best understood as involving coincidence is never spelled out. This paper shows under what conditions colocation entails coincidence and argues that the entailment depends on a principle that actually rules out certain forms of colocation. This undermines the argument from colocation to coincidence.

Abstract Team semantics is a highly general framework for logics which describe dependencies and independencies among variables. Typically, the (in)dependencies considered in this context are properties of sets of configurations or data records. We show how team semantics can be further generalized to support languages for the discussion of interventionist counterfactuals and causal dependencies, such as those that arise in manipulationist theories of causation (Pearl, […]