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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Grounding pluralism

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

My dissertation consists of a series of papers on grounding pluralism, the broad view that there are multiple kinds of metaphysical grounding relations. Specifically, I argue that there are three species of grounding: why-grounding (which tells us why things are the case), how-grounding (which tells us how things are the case), and what-grounding (which tells us what it is for things to be the case). I call the resulting view wh-pluralism. I show how wh-pluralism can resolve various debates within metaphysics.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Richardson, Kevin Andrew
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Stephen Yablo.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113777
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113777

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Richardson, Kevin Andrew. Grounding pluralism. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113777