The Modal Theory of Anchoring
I am happy to announce that my paper, “The Modal Theory of Anchoring,” has been accepted to The Philosophical Quarterly. Here is the abstract:
Here are two social explanations. One: Megan is a US citizen because she was born in the US. Two: because certain laws hold in the US, everyone born in the US is a US citizen. To make sense of social explanations like these, Brian Epstein argues that we must distinguish between two relations of social dependence: grounding and anchoring. Several metaphysicians have criticized the idea that grounding and anchoring are distinct relations. The goal of this paper is to defend anchoring by presenting a theory that avoids the problematic assumption that anchoring is a grounding-like relation. According to the modal theory of anchoring, anchoring is a modality generator (or modal function). Given an anchoring proposition A, there exists a modality [A] that I call an anchoring context. The anchoring context of A tells us what must be true relative to A. Anchoring generates distinctively social modalities.
I will upload a version of the paper soon.