Grounding Without Fundamentality: A Critique of Priority Monism in the Context of Structural Realism

Abstract

This paper challenges Jonathan Schaffer’s priority monism — the thesis that the cosmos as a whole is the single fundamental entity upon which all else depends — by arguing that grounding relations need not terminate in any fundamental relatum whatsoever. Drawing on ontic structural realism and recent developments in the metaphysics of dependence, we propose a model of flat grounding pluralism: a non-well-founded grounding structure in which relations of ontological priority obtain without any privileged terminus. We argue that priority monism’s commitment to a fundamental “blobject” is motivated by an overly restrictive conception of what well-founded grounding requires, and that once this requirement is relaxed, the theoretical advantages Schaffer claims for monism are either dissolved or equally available to its rivals. The paper concludes by sketching a positive account of grounded reality without grounds, and by addressing the charge that such a view collapses into either coherentism or explanatory regress.