The Fragmentation of Being

(やまだぃちぅ) #1

notion of ground are closely tied together in the minds of grounding theorists, I’d
prefer not to appeal to the notion of explanation when characterizing what it is to be
a small-g relation.^44 There does not seem to be a common core to the various small-g
relations besides their inducement of relations of relative fundamentality.^45 (This
doesn’t mean that each small-g relation is itself definable in terms of relative
fundamentality plus some other relation; I doubt this is the case.)
Wilson (2014: 568, 576) suggests that extant grounding claims in the non-
grounding literature are largely schematic or general over the small-g ones. That is,
to say thatxgroundsyis just to say that there is some relation R betweenxandythat
is relevant to explaining whyyexists or obtains given the existence or obtainment ofx.
That might be the case; we’d have to ask specific authors who have made such claims
what they had in mind. Perhaps this is all those who employ the word“ground”in
contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind intend; for example, a physic-
alist might wish to say that there is some way in which the physical grounds the
mental without being very confident about what that way is.
I doubt, however, that as we go deeper into the history of philosophy, we willfind
that grounding talk is merely schematic. One can characterize much of the grounding
literature (indeed much of contemporary metaphysics) as pre-critical in the Kantian
sense. And in this case, this characterization is not ungrounded. Consider, for
example, the important pre-critical metaphysician Baumgarten (2014), whoseMeta-
physicaserved as Kant’s textbook for the majority of his academic career.^46 For some
illustrative examples, note that Baumgarten closely links grounding and metaphys-
ical explanation in section 14 and immediately defines a notion of dependency in
terms of ground; in section 21, he distinguishes sufficient from partial grounding;
and, in section 25, he defends the transitivity of grounding. What Baumgarten does
looks a lot like what Schaffer does. Baumgarten appears to be a fan of entity
grounding, and spends some time discussing it before invoking it in other contexts.
There is little reason to think that Baumgarten is merely making schematic claims.
Similar remarks apply to the important post-Kantian philosopher, Bolzano, whose
philosophical depth is fortunately becoming increasingly well known. Bolzano
(2014b: 243–80) provides an extensive discussion of fact grounding, carefully distin-
guishes it from other notions in the neighborhood with which it might be conflated,
describing a rudimentary logic of ground, introduces various technical notions that
might be defined in terms of ground, and so forth. Bolzano (2014b: 252–3) also states
that his notion of grounding is ideologically primitive. I do not see evidence that talk
of grounding is merely schematic in Bolzano.


(^44) For example, Dasgupta (2015) simply identifies grounding with metaphysical explanation.
(^45) As Wilson (2014: 568–70) points out, there are many formal differences between the various small-g
grounding relations she discusses. Cameron (2014: 50) suggests that one advantage of accepting that
grounding“is said in many ways”is that we accommodate these formal differences while preserving some
degree of unity. 46
See Watkins (2009: 85–6) for a discussion of Kant’s use of Baumgarten’sMetaphysicaas a textbook.


 BEING AND GROUND

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