be resisted! Those committed to grounding should make sure that they have an
adequate theory of propositions that accords with that commitment.^37
The strategy for identifying fact grounding is much the same as the strategy for
identifying entity grounding discussed in the previous section. First, dofirst-order
metaphysics in order to get an inventory of the various connective relations between
facts that are needed for a complete theory. Perhaps this inventory of connective
relations will include the relation ofentailment(in play when one fact obtains in all
the worlds in which another fact obtains),constitution(in play when the existence of
a lump of matter constitutes the existence of a statue or a moral fact is constituted by
a physical fact),determination(in play when the fact that something is scarlet
determines the fact that something is red),disjunction(in play when two facts
form their disjunction), and many others. We won’t know what they are independ-
ently of doingfirst-order metaphysics. Wilson (2014) calls these kind of relations
“small-g grounding relations”and suggests that these relations plus some notion of
absolute fundamentality suffice to do all the work that fact grounding is supposed to
do. Similarly, Silverman (2013: 105) worries that grounding does no work at all, since
Fine himself accepts three specific kinds of grounding and thinks of generic ground-
ing as something like a disjunction of them (this will be discussed more in section
8.4), and, according to Silverman, these three more specific grounding relations in
turn are replaceable by even more specific relations of the kinds that Silverman calls
reductive, emergent, and supervenience relations.
Ifind much of what Wilson and Silverman say very congenial. In what follows, I’ll
focus on Wilson’s discussion, since it is far more extensive.
Wilson employs a notion of absolute fundamentality. I accept such a notion; in
fact, I accept many such notions. One of them was the focus of chapters 5 and 7: the
absolutely fundamental as the fully real. And similarly, for me,“relative fundamen-
tality”talk is best cashed out in terms of some kind of ontological superiority. In this
case, the relevant kind of ontological superiority seems to be degree of being.
Let’s see whether degree of being is the right kind of ontological superiority to
appeal to in this context. Suppose that some facts have more being than others. (We
needn’t suppose that any fact has the highest degree of being.) Provided that we have
arrived at a suitable list of connecting relations between facts, we could identify
grounding (the phenomenon!) with the transitive closure of the disjunction of the
conjunctions of connecting relations plusbeing more real than.^38
Will such an identification succeed? I assume once again that there are no“bare
relations of grounding.”That is, it is never the case that two facts are related by the
grounding relation without there being other relations obtaining between them that
(^37) One might consider a theory of propositions that individuates them in terms of grounding; this is
more or less the theory I explore in McDaniel (2015). 38
If we wish to accommodate the possibility of many-one grounding, then some of these connecting
relations must also take plural arguments. I foresee no special difficulty with this.