Well Founding Grounding Grounding

Abstract

Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded ("the meta-grounding thesis") must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of "well-founded", which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with any of the three notions of "well-founded". Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure.

The fundamental: Ungrounded or all-grounding?

“…one that quantifies over building relations: the complete set at a world is the set whose members build, in one way or another, everything else. (Bennett 2017, 110) 9 There are a variety of ''well-foundedness'' conditions in the vicinity here, but differences among them do not matter for present purposes (Dixon 2016b;Rabin and Rabern 2016). It is not clear what should count as fundamental in the sense of all-grounding in a world of infinite descent. 10 Perhaps the most plausible thing to say is that the notion is not defined relative to such a world.…”

Normativity all the way down: from normative realism to pannormism

“…Schaffer 2009;Dixon 2016;Rabin and Rabern 2016). In fact, I believe grounding might be non-well-founded, indefinitely descending (see e.g.…”

Priority monism

“…12 This is how Schaffer (2010a) seems to understand concrete foundationalism. 13 For related discussion, see Bliss (2013), Dixon (2016), Rabin and Rabern (2016), Tahko (Forthcoming), and Trogdon (Forthcoming).…”

“…For related discussion, see Bliss (), Dixon (), Rabin and Rabern (), Tahko (Forthcoming), and Trogdon (Forthcoming). …”