Ingvar Johansson

(Published in K. Mulligan ed., Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics. The Philosophy and Theory of Language of Anton Marty, Kluwer 1990.)

ABSTRACT

To the Swiss philosopher Anton Marty, the concept of ‘grounded relations’ (in German: "begründete Relationen", "bedingte Relationen", or "fundierte Relationen") was important. He regarded all such relations as (in his own terminology) non-real, i.e. they have objective existence but they cannot possibly have any direct causal effects. In his writings one can find a threefold division (partly overlapping) of such relations. I maintain in my paper that this division is at bottom a division of the relata involved. Some grounded relations are grounded on real relata; some are grounded on non-real relata; and some - called ideal relations - have relata which belong to ontologicaly different genera, e.g. the mental and the physical.

(The abstract is published with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers, with homepage address: http://www.wkap.nl.)