Jon Erling Litland

• Litland, Jon Erling (2026). Beyond Substitution—An Antipositionalist's Guide to Subtraction—. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. ISSN 0031-8205. doi: 10.1111/phpr.70113. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Existing accounts of relations do not properly account for variably polyadic relations: they fail to capture the relationship between completions of the same relation by different numbers of relata. This paper develops a fully general account of such relations by adding an operation of subtraction to the antipositionalist theory of relations pioneered by Fine in “Neutral Relations”. Along the way we rebut a common argument against antipositionalism; defend some strong principles about the behavior of occurrences of objects; and speculatively propose some principles about the structure of variably polyadic relations.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2026). Grounding conditionals. Philosophical Studies. ISSN 0031-8116. doi: 10.1007/s11098-025-02458-x. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper develops a systematic account of the immediate grounds of conditionals, uses this to give a ground-theoretic semantics for the language of intuitionistic propositional logic, and proves intuitionistic logic sound and complete with respect to this semantics. A striking consequence of the account is that all intuitionistic validities are zero-grounded and thus—unlike distinctively classical validities—make no demand on reality.

• Buchanan, Ray & Litland, Jon Erling (2026). A Note on Ground and Rigidity in advance. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy. doi: 10.5840/tht202611456. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  It has been argued that Rigidifying Descriptivists cannot capture the truth-conditions of sentences involving proper names. We argue that we must distinguish between the conditions under which the proposition expressed by a sentence is true and the conditions in which the truth of the expressed proposition consists. We show that the Rigidifying Descriptivist can capture the former but not the latter.

• Litland, Jon Erling & Miller, Taylor-Grey (2026). Towards an inferentialist account of essentialist explanation. Philosophical Studies. ISSN 0031-8116. doi: 10.1007/s11098-025-02438-1. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The fact that it is essential that p in some sense explains that p . This paper makes one negative and one positive contribution. Negatively, the paper argues that the sense of explanation is not ground , and we prove—contra Vogt—that the issue has nothing to do with whether one works with a representational or worldly notion of ground. Positively, the paper proposes an inferentialist account of essence and uses that to develop an account of essentialist explanation.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2025). A Philosophical Introduction to Higher-Order Logics, by Andrew Bacon. Mind. ISSN 0026-4423. doi: 10.1093/mind/fzaf018. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Litland, Jon Erling (2025). Real, Immediate, Multiple: Towards a Theory of Definition. Metaphysics. 8(2), s. 1–17. doi: 10.5334/met.190. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In ‘Senses of Essence’ Kit Fine tentatively proposed that one could take the notion of real definition as basic and define essence in terms of it. Building on Litland 2023 this paper begins to develop an account where the notion of full, immediate real definition is taken as basic. We then sketch how one can provide non-circular definitions of the logical operations and sketch how one can define various essentialist operations.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2024). Logic of Essence. I Raven, Michael & Kathrin, Koslicki (Red.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. Routledge. ISSN 9781003008750. s. 240–255. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Litland, Jon Erling (2024). Truthmaker Semantics for Intuitionistic Modal Logic. Topoi. ISSN 0167-7411. doi: 10.1007/s11245-024-10094-z. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  A truthmaker for a proposition P is exact if it contains nothing irrelevant to P. What are the exact truthmakers for necessitated propositions? This paper makes progress on this issue by showing how to extend Fine’s truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic logic to an exact truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic modal logic. The project is of interest also to the classical logician: while all distinctively classical theorems may be true, they differ from the intuitionistic ones in how they are made true. This sheds new light on the status of the T and B axioms.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2024). Criteria of Identity: Ground, Essence, Abstraction. Dialectica. ISSN 0012-2017. 78(3). doi: https:/philarchive.org/rec/LITCOI-2. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Haderlie, Derek & Litland, Jon Erling (2024). Grounding Legalism. The Philosophical Quarterly. ISSN 0031-8094. doi: 10.1093/pq/pqae073. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Many authors have proposed that grounding is closely related to metaphysical laws. However, we argue that no existing theory of metaphysical laws is sufficiently general. In this paper, we develop a general theory of grounding laws, proposing that they are generative relations between pluralities of propositions and propositions. We develop the account in an essentialist language; this allows us to state precisely the sense in which grounding might be reduced to laws. We then put the theory to use in showing how moral laws can play a role in grounding particular moral facts, in defending monism about ground, and in showing in what sense there is no gap between the grounds and the grounded. Finally, we make a novel proposal about what grounds facts about ground.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2023). Ground first: against the proof-theoretic definition of ground. Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857. 201(1). doi: 10.1007/s11229-022-04028-8. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Abstract This paper evaluates the proof-theoretic definition of ground developed by Poggiolesi in a range of recent publications and argues that her proposed definition fails. The paper then outlines an alternative approach where logical consequence relations and the logical operations are defined in terms of ground.

• Litland, Jon Erling (2022). Collective Abstraction. Philosophical Review. ISSN 0031-8108. doi: 10.1215/00318108-10136830. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Litland, Jon Erling (2022). A Note on the Wilhelmine Inconsistency. Analysis. ISSN 0003-2638. doi: 10.1093/analys/anab048. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Litland, Jon Erling (2022). Grounding and defining identity. Noûs. ISSN 0029-4624. 57, s. 850–876. doi: 10.1111/nous.12430. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  I systematically defend a novel account of the grounds for identity and distinctness facts: they are all uniquely zero-grounded. First, this Null Account is shown to avoid a range of problems facing other accounts: a relation satisfying the Null Account would be an excellent candidate for being the identity relation. Second, a plenitudinist view of relations suggests that there is such a relation. To flesh out this plenitudinist view I sketch a novel framework for expressing real definitions, use this framework to give a definition of identity, and show how the central features of the identity relation can be deduced from this definition.

• Litland, Jon Erling & Yli-Vakkuri, Tuomo Juhani (2016). Vagueness & modality - an ecumenical approach. Philosophical Perspectives. ISSN 1520-8583. 30(1), s. 229–269. doi: 10.1111/phpe.12088. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Litland, Jon Erling (2013). On Some Counterexamples to the Transitivity of Grounding. Essays in Philosophy: A Biannual Journal. 14(1), s. 19–32. doi: 10.7710/1526-0569.1453. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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