Fine - guide to ground.pdf - Ted Sider

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more inclined, is that we understand the former in terms of the latter. One statement of
consequentialist essence may be partly grounded in others. The fact that it lies in the nature of a
given set to be a set or a set, for example, is partly grounded in the fact that it lies in the nature of the
set to be a set. The constitutive claims of essence can then be taken to be those consequentialist
statements of essence that are not partly grounded in other such claims. This way of conceiving the
distinction enables us to ‘factor out’ the purely essentialist aspect of the concept of essence from the
partly explanatory aspect. But it means that the constitutive concept of essence is then of no help to
us in understanding the concept of ground.
But there is perhaps a more serious objection to the proposed definition, which may arise
even when we make use of the constitutive conception of essence. For certain statements of essence
appear to be symmetric between ground and what is grounded. It might be thought, for example, that
there is a distinction between existing at a time and existing simpliciter and that it is essential to any
object that exists in time that it exists simpliciter iff it exists at a time. But the definition will then
give us an equal right to say that the object exists simpliciter in virtue of existing at a time and that it
exists at a time in virtue of existing simpliciter. But compatibly with the essentialist claim, we might
want to make the first of these ground-theoretic statements to the exclusion of the other and we
would certainly not want to make both statements under a strict conception of ground or even under a
weak conception of ground, given that existing at a time essentially involves the notion of time while
existing simpliciter does not.
I think it should be recognized that there are two fundamentally different types of
explanation. One is of identity, or of what something is; and the other is of truth, or of how things
are. It is natural to want to reduce them to a common denominator - to see explanations of identity as
a special kind of explanation of the truth or to see explanations of truth as a special kind of