Inheritance

This project investigates what we call inheritance claims - claims to the effect that something inherits its features from something else - and argues that such claims are elliptical for a distinctive kind of argument.

Inheritance claims are sometimes made in a ‘metaphysical spirit’, with the goal of telling us something about what the world is like and why.

When arguments featuring claims of this kind are sound they are so in part due to the functioning of a worldly inheritance mechanism.

Inheritance claims are also sometimes made in an ‘epistemic spirit’ where they are offered as justification for particular kinds of beliefs. These two kinds of claims are not carefully distinguished in the literature.

We will argue that epistemic inheritance is a form of reasoning itself based on or presupposing metaphysical inheritance.

We will investigate potential candidates for inheritance mechanisms as well as what difference these make to the force and plausibility of inheritance arguments. We hypothesize that it will make a significant difference.

This project is important because in spite of being quite common, neither inheritance claims nor inheritance arguments have been brought to salience and investigated directly, which means that we lack the resources to properly evaluate either. Which means that we lack the resources to engage in one aspect of theory evaluation and theory comparison.

With this project, we hope to be able to remedy this situation.