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<p>Fabrice Correia has recently provided reason to think that <i>transcendent</i> entities—entities that are grounded but have no immediate grounds—may exist. I point out that, if they do, grounding fails to have a more general property; it is not <i>accessible</i>, i.e., it is not the case that if <i>x</i> grounds <i>y</i>, there is a chain of finitely many steps of immediate grounding between <i>x</i> and <i>y</i>. I then show that the possibility that grounding is not accessible has two important consequences. First, it provides a reason to prefer one of the two standard ways that grounding has been axiomatized in the literature to the other. Second, there would be cases for which Correia’s and Jonas Werner’s recent definitions of relative fundamentality in terms of grounding do not provide satisfactory measures. I develop an alternative definition that yields more satisfying results in these cases.</p>

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Accessibility and relative fundamentality

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月9日

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  • Scott Dixon

摘要

Fabrice Correia has recently provided reason to think that transcendent entities—entities that are grounded but have no immediate grounds—may exist. I point out that, if they do, grounding fails to have a more general property; it is not accessible, i.e., it is not the case that if x grounds y, there is a chain of finitely many steps of immediate grounding between x and y. I then show that the possibility that grounding is not accessible has two important consequences. First, it provides a reason to prefer one of the two standard ways that grounding has been axiomatized in the literature to the other. Second, there would be cases for which Correia’s and Jonas Werner’s recent definitions of relative fundamentality in terms of grounding do not provide satisfactory measures. I develop an alternative definition that yields more satisfying results in these cases.