parthood relations but I doubt that there is any illuminating definition that will tell us
why these parthood relations are allparthoodrelations. The best one can say is that
these relations form an analogous relation (in the sense of section 2.3) rather than a
mere disjunction. If one of these relations is our paradigmatic parthood relation—
such as the relation between hand and human organism—then the aptness of calling
the remaining relations“parthood relations”is explained by their analogy with the
paradigm. Similarly, even if grounding pluralism is true, there might be nothing
more to say about why each grounding relation isagrounding relation besides to
point out that the generic form of grounding is an analogous relation rather than a
mere disjunction.^9 (Whether this is all that can be said will be discussed more in
section 8.4.) If this is the case, then the only remaining questions about methodological
primitivism concern whether the individual grounding relations are sufficiently intel-
ligible to be utilized in theoretical contexts.
For now, let’s focus on grounding monism. Why demand a definition of“ground”
prior to its employment in metaphysical theories? Definitions are useful for demon-
strating the coherence of notions, but they are not strictly necessary for such
demonstrations. Another way to show the coherence of a notion is to use it in
one’s theories and then show that one doesn’t run into logical problems or incoher-
encies. This is one of the points of Rosen (2010). I take the efforts of Rosen (2010),
Fine (2012a), Audi (2012), and others to at least provide a prima facie case that
grounding locutions are coherent. In general, one ought to be charitable when faced
with an expression in a linguistic community that appears to be consistently used to
utter sincerely expressed sentences in contexts in which speakers are attempting to
express literal claims.“Ground”seems to meet this condition. Charity certainly does
not demand that one forego the quest for analyses or accounts of alien vocabulary,
but it does require forfeiting the demand that one’s interlocutor present them in one’s
home vocabulary. I am comfortable with claiming that grounding is methodologic-
ally primitive. Methodological primitiveness is the least philosophically interesting
form of primitiveness.
A quick clarification: as I understand methodological primitiveness, it is appro-
priate to appeal to grounding locutions in one’sfirst-order theorizing in advance of
providing definitions or analyses of these notions. It is a further question whether it is
methodologically appropriate to theorize about grounding per se—as one does when
one seeks to determine the“logic”of ground—in advance of definition or analysis.
My tentative view is that this is also appropriate, but one must also not take such
(^9) Cameron (2014: 49) suggests that there is“some prior instance of priority on which the other
instances ontologically depend.”In the terminology of section 2.2, the suggestion is that grounding
might enjoy metaphysical analogy with a focal point. My concern with this suggestion is that, as
Cameron (2014: 50) notes, it is unclear what the focal grounding relation is to which all others are to be
referred. If there is no plausible candidate, then at best grounding enjoys metaphysical analogy without a
focal point. That might be analogy enough, though; recall that in section 2.3, I suggested that parthood
enjoys metaphysical analogy without a focal point. And perhapsbeingdoes as well.