orderly way. And questions about the nature and status of ground cannot be arrived
at without furtherfirst-order metaphysical speculation as well. My primary interest is
in the connection between ground and being, and which of these two aspects of
reality is in some way primary. I won’t be unsettled if ground turns out to be
metaphysically primitive in some way, but neither will I rejoice. But I will happily
make use of the notion even if it can only be taken as metaphysically primitive if it is
to be taken at all, and in chapter 9 I will avail myself of talk of ground.
One further question is whether the friend of ground has a reason to take on board
some further structuring metaphysical notion, such as naturalness or degree of being.
I think the answer is“yes,”provided that one is also a pluralist about grounding. Let’s
turn to this further question next.
8.4 Ground: Unity, Plurality, Analogy
I’ll argue that if one is a pluralist about grounding, then one should also accept a
further structuring feature, such as degrees of being. This argument won’t rely on
whether some feature like degree of being is needed to characterize what it is to be a
small-g grounding relation, and it won’t rely on any identification of grounding with
some construction out of degrees of being plus suitable connecting relations. The
central premise of the argument is that the proponent of grounding pluralism needs
to have some way of accounting for the unity of the generic relation of grounding,
since it is not plausible that the generic relation of grounding is simply a mere
disjunction of the more specific relations of grounding.^63 In order to assess the
argument, though, we need to get clearer on what it is to be a pluralist rather than
a monist about grounding. To do this, we’ll discuss two different ways of being a
pluralist about grounding, which I’ll callthinandthickpluralism respectively.
The monist about grounding believes that there is exactly one distinctive relation
of grounding. If it is a relation between entities in general, it applies to entities
regardless of ontological category, save for perhaps the category to which grounding
itself belongs; if it is a relation between facts only, it nonetheless can relate facts
concerning any subject matter, save for perhaps the subject matter of grounding
itself. (Recall the discussion of the grounds of grounding in section 8.2, which
accounts for the hedging here.) Call this relation, whatever its relata might be,generic
grounding.^64 The pluralist thinks that there is more than one distinctive relation of
grounding. The kind of pluralist that I will focus on is one who believes in both
(^63) As Cameron (2014) notes, opponents of grounding have held that at best grounding is a merely
disjunctive relation, while proponents of grounding have often been monists. 64
This is not to say that grounding is agenusin the Aristotelian sense. Just as in chapter 1, where
I distinguished between a generic mode of being and specific modes of being, and stated that the generic
mode of being is merely that mode of being that any being enjoys whenever it enjoys some mode of being
or other. Similarly, generic grounding is that relation that relates pairs whenever they are related by any
other specific relations of grounding (provided that there are such relations).