Ground Rules: Lessons from Wilson

Abstract

Wilson's " No Work for a Theory of Grounding " (2014) offers an insightful critique of grounding-based approaches to metaphysical inquiry. She argues that the notion of grounding is uninformative, disunified, and in the end unhelpful. She then sketches a rival approach which eschews the notion of grounding, in favor of a plurality of " small-'g' " grounding-type notions alongside a primitive notion of absolute fundamentality. I think that Wilson is right to criticize many extant grounding-based approaches for not being sufficiently informative. I just think that it is possible for the grounding theorist to do better, and that my own (forthcoming) treatment in terms of structural equations (which are formal models developed for understanding causal structure) does better in the needed ways. I also think that her rival approach deserves serious consideration in its own right. But I argue that her approach is open to serious criticisms, including every one of the criticisms she levels at the grounding theorist. My subtitle is " Lessons from Wilson " since I am saying that all theorists—including Wilson herself— should draw the lesson that one needs more informative conceptions of metaphysical structure, of the sort I take structural equation models to provide.