more gruesome variant of it. Proponents of ground seem largely content to take the
notion of ground as an ideological primitive while remaining officially neutral on the
question of whether and in what sense it might be metaphysically primitive. What
these reflections suggest is that the grounding theorist, regardless of whether she is a
monist or a pluralist, has a reason either to take grounding as a metaphysical
primitive or to enrich her metaphysics with further notions such as naturalness,
structure, or degrees of being. I suggest the latter course of action.
8.6 Chapter Summary
In this chapter, I focused on grounding. In what sense, if any, is grounding a
primitive relation? Perhaps conceptually or methodologically, but not in any way
metaphysically. Several ways of defining up a relation of grounding in terms of some
kind of ontological superiority plus other connecting relations were explored. We
also explored whether the proponent of grounding should help herself to some
relation of ontological superiority as well. I argued that both the grounding
pluralist—a person who believes in many different metaphysically important
grounding relations—and the grounding monist both have reasons to believe in an
additional relation of ontological superiority. The pluralist does because she needs to
account for the unity of the generic relation of ground; it is not plausible that it is a
mere disjunction, and so it is either a determinable or an analogous property. But
these distinctions were accounted for in terms of naturalness, which I argued is a kind
of ontological superiority. The monist about grounding needs some way to defuse
grounding variantism, a view analogous to quantifier variantism, and here again
appealing to naturalness does the job.