What does grounding mean in philosophy?

The general idea behind this conception of metaphysical foundationalism is that grounding is the relation by which the world is hierarchically structured from fundamental facts to increasingly derivative facts.

What does grounding mean?

Earthing (also known as grounding) refers to contact with the Earth’s surface electrons by walking barefoot outside or sitting, working, or sleeping indoors connected to conductive systems, some of them patented, that transfer the energy from the ground into the body.

What is the example of metaphysics?

Metaphysics is a difficult branch of Philosophy, but is rather easy to define: It is the study of the most fundamental concepts and beliefs about them. Examples of metaphysical concepts are Being, Existence, Purpose, Universals, Property, Relation, Causality, Space, Time, Event, and many others.

What is ontological dependence?

Ontological dependence is a relation—or, more accurately, a family of relations—between entities or beings (onta in Greek, whence ontological). More specifically, a being may be said to depend, in such a sense, upon one or more other beings for its existence or for its identity.

How is grounding related to the notion of fundamentality?

Bricker (2006), for example, suggests the following partial analysis: grounding is a relation between propositions, and one proposition grounds another if the former is fundamental in nature and the latter supervenes on the former. (See §3 for more on the relata of grounding, and §6.2 for more on the notion of fundamentality).

Are there any other examples of metaphysical grounding?

The thought is that, in addition to metaphysical grounding, there is, for example, the relation of natural grounding that is of particular interest to science and the relation of normative grounding that is of particular interest to ethics. On this view, the topic of this entry isn’t grounding per se but metaphysical grounding.

Is the concept of grounding a SPO or irreflexive?

There is another important issue concerning the grounding conception of metaphysical foundationalism. It presupposes that grounding imposes a strict partial ordering (SPO) on the entities in its domain: grounding is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. Some argue, however, that grounding isn’t an SPO.

Can you offer a substantive characterization of grounding?

If the general conception of grounding just articulated is correct, then a substantive orienting characterization of grounding is as follows: grounding tout court is the coarse-grained metaphysical relation that unifies various metaphysical relations. But can we do more than offer orienting characterizations of grounding?