grounder, focusing solely on relations between facts yields an impoverished view
of ground.
Conversely, the fact-grounder can understand entity grounding within her own
system. The friend of fact grounding can view the proponent of entity grounding as
holding an unduly narrow view of which facts stand in the grounding relation. Let’s
make a safe-in-this-dialectical-context assumption that there are infinitely many
facts and that the cardinality of these facts is at least as great as the cardinality of
those entities that are not facts. Given this assumption, there is a function that will
take us from ordered pairs of entities related by the entity-grounding relation to
ordered pairs of facts that are suitably related to those entities. So whenever an entity-
grounder claims that an entityxgrounds another entityy, the fact-grounder can
understand that grounding claim in terms of a relation between facts suitably related
toxandy. One obvious translation scheme is the following:xentity-groundsy=df.
the fact thatxexists fact-grounds the fact thatyexists. (That there are many such
schemes might be of little concern to the fact-grounder: it is enough that there is one
way to understand entity grounding in terms of fact grounding.)
There is an initial worry that this“translation”of entity grounding into fact
grounding will conflate grounding claims the entity-grounder wishes to distinguish.
For example, the entity-grounder might think it is an open question whether facts
ground individual constituents of those facts or vice versa. Initially, it seems like the
proposal under discussion cannot distinguish these possibilities, but this is not so.
Under the considered translation, if an entity-grounder says that an individual
constituent C grounds fact F, the fact-grounder understands her to be saying that
the existence of C grounds the existence of F. And when an entity-grounder instead
says that F grounds C, the friend of fact grounding understands her to be saying that
the existence of F grounds the existence of C. More generally, in order to avoid
conflating or collapsing entity-grounding claims, the fan of fact grounding can
uniformly translate all such claims into claims about the fact-grounding relations
between existential facts. And this is why the fact-grounder will thereby view the
entity-grounder as having an unduly restrictive view of what the grounding relation
relates. From the perspective of the fact-grounder, the entity-grounder thinks that the
grounding relation relates only facts of a certain type, namely, existential facts.^78
Given that the entity-grounder and the fact-grounder can recognize each other’s
relation of grounding by holding that it is a restriction on their own preferred notion,
is there any sense in which one of them has gotten the nature of ground correct?
By each of their lights, their own respective notion of grounding might be ideologic-
ally primitive and the competing notion unduly restrictive. However, whether in
Sider (2011: 163) notes, a different option is to take them to be facts (understood not merely as
true propositions).
(^78) Thanks to Jonathan Schaffer for discussion here. Note that he does not agree with the lesson I draw.
Compare with Sider (2011: 163).