Bader’s stochastic grounding makes it a matter of chance which of two co-created coincidents is the statue, giving each a positive chance of the other’s kind. With positive chance implying possibility, the statue could have been a lump. That conflicts with sortal essentialism about the statue and, given two modal premises, with the unrestricted survival datum. A categorical-kind reply can block the second conflict, but its own idea motivates persistence premises that extend Bader’s account acros…
Read moreBader’s stochastic grounding makes it a matter of chance which of two co-created coincidents is the statue, giving each a positive chance of the other’s kind. With positive chance implying possibility, the statue could have been a lump. That conflicts with sortal essentialism about the statue and, given two modal premises, with the unrestricted survival datum. A categorical-kind reply can block the second conflict, but its own idea motivates persistence premises that extend Bader’s account across worlds. Suppose that the base fixes the clay’s later history, influences included, and that the actual lump survives the squashing unopposed. A pluralist who grants those premises and denies that the statue could have survived in these circumstances must deny that the exchange’s chance has a realiser with the whole pre-resolution base. Bader gives no explicit rule requiring one. With the base accessible and the background exchange-invariant, symmetric premises cannot entail that exclusion: it needs the allocation, a fact dependent on the allocation or an independent sortal fact. Where the squashing is open, under further assumptions, the denial moves but does not disappear. Rejecting the persistence premises instead has costs of its own, and positing an unexplained bearer-specific feature raises the grounding problem’s question again.
