Four Questions of Iterated Grounding

Abstract

The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly "back" it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give "easy" answers to these questions-easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation.

An explanatory idealist theory of grounding

“…But such revisionary views don't deny the alignment between the formal properties of grounding and those of metaphysical explanation; they seem to be revisionary about both in the same way. 38 See Rodriguez-Pereyra, 2005: 28, Schnieder, 2010: 326-8, and Kovacs, 2017: 2934and 2020b for this interpretation of 'backing'-talk. An alternative view, with which my main point would go through just as well, is that backing is a special case of grounding (Wirling 2020).…”

“…In fact, just as the unionism vs. separatism controversy crosscuts the relational vs. connective debate (cf. Kovacs, 2020b: 344 n15), it's also orthogonal to the choice between realist and idealist views.…”

“…3838See Rodriguez‐Pereyra, 2005: 28, Schnieder, 2010: 326–8, and Kovacs, 2017: 2934 and 2020b: 346–50 for this interpretation of ‘backing’‐talk. An alternative view, with which my main point would go through just as well, is that backing is a special case of grounding (Wirling 2020).…”

The Question of Iterated Causation

“…Donagan (1977: 701) makes a similar objection to Chisholm's account of agent causation, which leads to an infinite regress of just this form; see also O'Connor (2000: 57-58) for further discussion. 42 A view I recently defended (Kovacs 2020), according to which the Question of Iterated Grounding can be disambiguated into four questions, three of which are (on certain assumptions) trivially answerable, is also not applicable to the Question of Iterated Causation. This is because this view explicitly trades on the ambiguity of 'grounding' between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations underlying metaphysical explanation.…”

The Taming of the Grounds

“…Now, assume that hole H is large because perforation P is large. Some separatists will say that what “backs” or “undergirds” this is that H’s being large is non-causally generated, produced, or dependent on P’s being large (for more on what this “backing” relation amounts to, see Kovac [2020a]). But I do not say this.…”