picture of fundamentality I prefer, grounding itself might still be a highly natural
relation. But given the role that degree of being/naturalness plays in characterizing
what it is to be a small-g grounding relation, and given the connection between small-
g and big-G grounding assumed so far, I would not think that grounding has more
being than degree of being.
I have assumed in what preceded that there is no unmediated instantiation of big-
G grounding: every instantiation of big-G grounding is accompanied by an instan-
tiation of some small-g grounding relation, or some connecting chain of them. The
proposal falls apart if this assumption is false.^48 Let me grant that though I think the
assumption is plausible, it also isn’t obviously true. Suppose, for example, that there is
a God as classically conceived, and that each fact of the formx is intrinsically goodis
grounded in a corresponding fact of the formx is intrinsically desired by God. It isn’t
obvious that there is a further small-g grounding relation between these two kinds of
facts that undergirds the pattern of grounding. Perhaps one factconstitutesthe other,
and this relation of constitution is the small-g relation in play, but this isn’t obviously
correct. So one can think of situations in which the assumption is false.^49 And to the
extent that we have a reason to think one of these situations obtains, we should
be nervous about the assumption. But conversely it would be unwise to reject the
assumption if all one can do is describe situations that one does not take to be
metaphysically possible. My recommendations are to seriously consider the assump-
tion but neither decisively accept nor reject it independently of doing otherfirst-order
metaphysical explorations.^50
Given this picture of grounding, is it the case that ifxgroundsy, thenxgroundsy
in every world in which they both exist? I am unsure (recall section 8.2). If it emerges,
however, that facts always have their connecting relations to each other as a matter
of necessity, then the answer is“yes,”given that relations of ontological superiority
never merely accidentally obtain. (Some connecting relations, such as the relation of
a disjunction to its disjuncts, are never exemplified merely accidentally.)
Before moving on, it might be worth considering other attempts to give“reduc-
tive”accounts of grounding that do not explicitly rely on the assumption that there is
no unmediated instantiation of big-G grounding. We’ll look at a proposal that
attempts to understand ground in terms of (strict) essence. (Questions about strict
essence and being will be the focus of chapter 9.)
Fine (1994a, 1995b),Lowe (2008), and others have argued that there is an
important non-modal notion of essence; that which it purportedly is a notion of
(^48) Wilson’s (2014) and Silverman’s (2013) criticisms also lose much of their teeth if this assumption is
false. 49
For a less theologically loaded example, consider Dasgupta’s (2014: 2) claim that facts about how
many kilograms of mass an object has are (plurally) grounded in scale-independent facts about compara-
tive mass relations between objects. If Dasgupta (2014) is correct, there is no clear small-g grounding
relation to serve as the intermediary. 50
Thanks to Tim O’Connor for discussion here.