Jessica Wilson, The Fundamentality First approach to metaphysical structure: Some objections and replies?
In a forthcoming issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review, I advance my preferred 'Fundamentality First' approach to metaphysical structure, coupling a primitivist account of fundamentality with a pluralist account of metaphysical dependence. Here I preent the view and respond to some objections raised by commentators Karen Bennett, Ricki Bliss, Kerry McKenzie, and Jonathan Schaffer.
Tuomas Tahko, Categorial Fundamentality
There is now a large body of work on the notion of fundamentality (see Tahko 2023) and it is not uncommon to hear talk of fundamental ontological categories. However, discussion of what the fundamentality of categories – or categorial fundamentality – amounts to is much rarer (for a few exceptions, see Lowe 2006, Simons 2012, Hakkarainen 2022, and Hakkarainen and Keinänen 2023). We may distinguish between the fundamentality of entities belonging to a certain ontological category and the fundamentality of the ontological category itself. For instance, one might consider certain properties to be fundamental, but it is another matter to say that the category 'property' is a fundamental category. In this paper, I shall analyse categorial fundamentality and suggest that we need a relatively fine-grained approach to it since it turns out that an ontological category may be considered fundamental even if it is dependent on other fundamental categories. In fact, the most viable approach is to consider a set of categories to be fundamental collectively if every entity that exists is a member of one (and only one) of these categories. However, more needs to be said about the relationship between fundamental categories and specifically the formal ontological relations that obtain between them. I will consider the category of natural kind as an example.
Stephan Hartmann, Framework Fundamentality
In the literature on scientific theories, one encounters three terms that are all too often not carefully distinguished from one another: ‘framework’, ‘theory’ and ‘model’. They are ordered here according to their generality, i.e. how ‘far away’ they are conceptually from the specific target systems. After discussing these three terms, I introduce three types of framework fundamentality: (i) ontic fundamentality, which refers to the objects described by a theoretical framework, (ii) epistemic fundamentality, which refers to our knowledge of these objects, and (iii) explanatory fundamentality. To illustrate these notions and to make them useful, I examine the physics of open quantum systems as a case study. Here we encounter two different frameworks – the standard quantum open systems theory (ST) and the general quantum theory of open systems (GT) – and I will argue that GT is more fundamental than ST. The talk is based on my joint paper “The Open Systems View” with Mike Cuffaro (available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11095).
Alyssa Ney, Fundamentality of Physics Without Completeness
In contemporary philosophy, the fundamentality of physics and physicalism are typically understood as ontological completeness claims of some sort. For example, physics is taken to provide a complete supervenience or realization basis, or a complete set of grounds for all facts or entities. However, since no formulated physical theory provides a complete ontological basis for all facts or entities, one must seek an alternative interpretation if one wants a realistic understanding of the sense in which our current physical theories are fundamental. The aim of this paper is to develop such an interpretation, one that bases the fundamentality of our current physical theories in a claim about their ontological depth and comprehensiveness. It is argued that this interpretation of the metaphysical fundamentality of physics is more in line with the way that physicists regard certain theories as fundamental than standard philosophical conceptions.
Kian Salimkhani, Fundamentality and Spacetime
By looking at recent work in the philosophy of space and time, I shall explore some options and challenges for articulating two common analyses of fundamentality: fundamentality as ontological dependence and fundamentality as complete determination.