Here is a hypothesis: specific facts about the essences of specific individuals are
never brute but are always partially grounded in a more general covering law that
specifies the essence of a kind of thing. I have no idea how to prove this, so I offer it
for you as an intriguing hypothesis.^97 Suppose this hypothesis is true. Suppose also
that there are maximally general laws of strict essences, that is, laws that govern the
strict essences of all and only the members of a given ontological category. What, if
anything, grounds these most general laws of strict essence? Second hypothesis: these
general laws of strict essence are in turn grounded in the existence of the relevant
ontological categories, which (recall section 4.3) simply are modes of being. The
general law that the strict essence of a set is to have the members that it has is
grounded in how sets exist.
Now we must be careful. In what does a fact about the existence of an ontological
category consist? Let“B”be a quantifier that corresponds to a mode of being M.
Suppose that the fact that M exists simply is the fact thatBxx=x. But if so, is this fact
itself grounded in further facts of the formBxx=y? And if so, have we snuck in
particular facts as partial grounders of general principles through the back door? To
make this worry more concrete, let M be the mode of being that all sets share. Let
S be a particular set. IsBxx= S grounded in something more basic, such as S = S?
Here my inclination is to say no. Remember that“B”is a restricted quantifier, and
hence the move fromΦytoBxΦx is not guaranteed to preserve truth. So there is
room to take S’s enjoying a fundamental mode (i.e.,Bxx= S) as an ungrounded fact.
So far we have a story of the partial grounding of all essential facts about sets. To
get the full ground of, for example, the fact that the essence of singleton Socrates is to
have Socrates as a member we simply conjoin this general law of the essences of sets
with the particular fact that Socrates is a member of singleton Socrates. I assume that
if a fact F fully grounds G, then necessarily, if F obtains, G obtains. And so the general
law of the essence of sets is not sufficient to fully ground the essence of the singleton
of Socrates, since the former obtains necessarily, while the latter obtains only if
Socrates exists. However, if we think that, in general, the fact that the essence ofx
is to be F is metaphysically independent of the existence ofx, then there is room to
say that the general law of essence fully rather than partially grounds each fact about
the essences of specific sets.
This is one way in which modes of being could serve as grounds of essence. Let’s
consider a second alternative way. Perhaps the mode of being sets enjoy is a partial
ground of each particular essentialist fact about sets. On this second alternative, what
grounds the fact that the essence of Socrates’singleton is to have Socrates as a
member is the conjunction of the mode of being of this set along with the particular
claim that Socrates is the sole member of this set. All claims about the particular
(^97) Kit Fine has communicated to me that hefinds this hypothesis attractive as well. Recall that Fine
(2012b: 11) claims that there is a set of fundamental essential truths that coupled with the non-essential
truths yields all the essential truths. Dasgupta (2016: section 4) discusses this hypothesis too.