A New Argument for the Groundedness of Grounding Facts

Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about "derivative entities"-e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences 'the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete' and 'the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p', where 'p' is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics-must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on a principle, Purity, which states that facts about derivative entities are non-fundamental. Purity is questionable. In this paper, I introduce a new argument-the argument from Settledness-for a similar conclusion but which does not rely on Purity. The conclusion of the new argument is that every "thick" grounding fact is grounded, where a grounding fact [F is grounded in G, H, …] is said to be thick when at least one of F, G, H, … is a fact-a condition that is automatically satisfied if grounding is factive. After introducing the argument, I compare it with the argument from Purity, and I assess its cogency relative to the relevant accounts of the connections between grounding and fundamentality that are available in the literature.