On the Plurality of Grounds

The second potential misconception to ward off is the idea that qual­itativism is just anti-haecceitism (and likewise that individualism just is haecceitism). This is a mistake. For anti-haecceitism (at least as charac­terized in the recent literature) is a modal thesis, a thesis to the effect that there can be no difference in the way the world is individualistically with­out a qualitative difference. Admittedly, the term ‘anti-haecceitism’ has been used for a number of related modal claims, some expressed with modal operators and others with quantification over worlds. But they are all modal claims, not grounding claims, and so none of them imply qualitativism for the reason that a necessary connection does not imply a connection of ground: as I said in section 1, if the Xs necessitate Y, this does not imply that the Xs ground Y. Of course it follows from my assumption that the grounded is necessitated by its grounds that qualitativism implies anti-haecceitism (in at least one of its characterizations). So if you are an anti-haecceitist this might be because you are a qualitativist. But it might instead be because you are an individualist who holds independent views about the workings of de re modality that imply anti-haecceitism.