Kind‐Dependent Grounding

Are grounding claims fully general in character? If a is F in virtue of being G, does it follow that anything that’s G has to be F for that reason? According to the thesis of Weak Formality, the answer is ‘yes’. In this paper, however, I argue that there is philosophical utility in rejecting this thesis. More exactly, I argue that two outstanding problems in contemporary metaphysics can be dealt with if we maintain that there can be cases of what I will refer to here as ‘kind-dependent grounding’, and, moreover, that once we allow for the possibility of such cases (in order to solve these problems), we must also hold that Weak Formality is false. The paper turns crucially on two main ideas, namely (i) that each object belongs to some fundamental kind, which can determine certain of the properties that it can have, and (ii) that grounding relations are able to hold conditionally. As we will see, in light of these two ideas we will be able to make sense of the notion of kind-dependent grounding that is central to this paper, and as a result solve two important outstanding metaphysical puzzles. If somebody claims of something named or unnamed that it moves, or runs or is white, he is liable to be asked the question by which Aristotle sought to define the category of substance: What is it that moves (or runs or is white)? Perhaps one who makes the claim that something moves does not need to know the answer to this question in order to enter his claim. It is not hard to envisage circumstances in which he can know that it moves without knowing what the thing is. Yet it seems certain...that, for each thing that satisfies a predicate such as ‘moves’, ‘runs’ or ‘white’, there must exist some...kind to which the item belongs and by reference to which the ‘what is it’ question could be answered. — Wiggins, D. (, p. ) [C]ertain conditions may produce a background to other conditions having a determinative role even though they do not themselves have a determinative role. — Fine (, p.)