various people have acted in a certain way grounds the fact that there is a conference.
When pressed to what grounds this grounding fact, it is natural to say that it is of the
essence of the fact that there is a conference that whenever there are people behaving
in the relevant ways, then there is a conference. In short, B’s having the strict essence
that it has grounds the fact that A grounds B.^57
Now given a reductive account of strict essence, we can give a reductive account of
what grounds grounding facts. This is great, but insufficient for our purposes. For our
purposes, we need a reductivedefinitionofgroundingitself. But here is a suggestion
for how to achieve this reduction. Thefirst step is to forbid any unanalyzed ground-
ing claim in a statement of the constitutive essence of a thing but allow other kinds of
determination claims, such as claims about entailment, to enter in this statement.^58
So, for example, do not say that it is part of the constitutive essence of the fact that
there is a conference that, whenever there are people behaving in certain ways,
then there is a conference that is grounded in that behavior.^59 But do say that it is
part of the constitutive essence of the fact that there is a conference that, necessarily,
whenever there are people behaving in certain ways, there is a conference where those
people are behaving.
One might worry that this restriction is unmotivated.^60 Consider, for example,
disjunctive facts. Don’t we have strong intuitions that it is part of the constitutive
essence of a disjunctive fact that it is grounded in its disjuncts? My proposal requires
distinguishing between:
(1) It is part of the constitutive essence of P or Q that P or Q is entailed by P
and
(2) It is part of the constitutive essence of P or Q that P or Q is grounded in P.
And it also requires that we accept only (1).(^57) Strictly speaking, things are more complicated than this: if we assume that grounds necessitate that
which they ground, we must also say that A is a partial ground of the fact that A grounds B. Let E = the
proposition that states B’s essence; let’s follow Rosen (2010) and use brackets to convert sentences into
terms that denote facts. If E is total ground for [A grounds B], then any world in which E obtains is a world
in which [A grounds B] obtains. [A grounds B] obtains only if A obtains. But there is a world in which
E obtains but A doesn’t. (A conference could have existed and had the essence that it actually has, even if
some of the people that actually constitute the conference did not attend.) Thanks to Shamik Dasgupta and
Alex Skiles for discussion here. 58
I am not certain that this is strictly required; it is easier to see how a reduction of ground could be
possible if no essentialist statement appeals to ground. But perhaps it is not impossible even if one does. 59
Contra Rosen (2010), who endorses essentialist claims that include information about grounding
within the scope of the essentialist operator. 60
Alex Skiles has suggested to me that this restriction is unneeded, and in which case, it might well be
unmotivated. His thought is that all that is required is that the relevant entailment fact belong to the
constitutive essence; it is OK if in addition further facts about grounding are also part of the constitutive
essence. His point seems to me to be technically correct. However, I have the following concern: if both
the facts about entailment and the facts about grounding belong to the constitutive essence of, e.g., a given
disjunction, then the constitutive essence is in a way redundantsince the grounding facts entail the
entailment facts. But maybe that’s OK?