Thursday, December 17, 2009

A variant on the grounding objection to Molinism

Premises:

  1. If there are any Molinist counterfactuals, there are ungrounded true contingent propositions.
  2. Propositions reporting divine beliefs are grounded.
  3. If p is a contingent truth (i.e., true proposition), then either God's belief is explained constitutively or causally by p, or p is explained constitutively or causally, or there is some third truth that explains both p and God's belief constitutively or causally.
  4. An ungrounded truth cannot be explained causally.
  5. An ungrounded truth cannot explain causally.
  6. When a truth p explains q constitutively, something that grounds p grounds q.
  7. God believes every truth.
It follows from (6) that an ungrounded truth cannot explain or be explained constitutively. It follows then (2)-(5) that no ungrounded contingent proposition is believed by God. It then follows from (7) that no ungrounded contingent proposition is true. It then follows that there are no Molinist counterfactuals.

Premise (3) is a way of working out the idea that God's beliefs are knowledge and cannot be merely contingently related to what makes them true.

[Edited. This is an improved version of the argument. -ARP]

1 comment:

  1. Does any molinist agree with (1)? It seems to me that that premise just is the grounding objection.

    It might also be consequential that truth-maker maximalism follows from (2)-(5), which most truth-maker theorists deny. Perhaps the only way to hold truth-maker maximalism is to be a theist?

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