Grounding and Auto-abstraction

Abstraction principles and grounding can be combined in a natural way (Rosen 2010, 117; Schwartzkopff 2011, 362]). However, some ground-theoretic abstraction principles entail that there are circles of partial ground (Donaldson 17, 793). I call this problem auto-abstraction. In this paper I sketch a solution. Sections 1 and 2 are introductory. In section 3 I start comparing different solutions to the problem. In section 4 I contend that the thesis that the right-hand side of an abstraction principle is (metaphysically) prior to its left-hand side motivates an independence constraint, and that this constraint leads to predicative restric- tions on the acceptable instances of ground-theoretic abstraction principles. In section 5 I argue that auto-abstraction is acceptable unless the left-hand side is essentially grounded by the right-hand side. In section 6 I highlight sev- eral parallelisms between auto-abstraction and the puzzles of ground. I finally compare my solution with the strategies listed in section 3