On the Plurality of Grounds

In this spirit, one aim of this paper is to argue that ground is irreducibly plural. It is well known that something’s ground can be a plurality — the occurrence of a conference is an example of something that is presumably grounded in a multitude of facts concerning the actions of its many par­ticipants. Those facts together are what explains why there is a conference occurring, even though none of them is a sufficient explanation individu­ally. But the literature uniformly assumes that what is grounded must be a single fact. Here I disagree and argue that what is grounded can be a plurality too: there can be cases in which they, the members of a plural­ity, are explained in more fundamental terms, even though none of them admits of explanation on its own.