Grounding and Reduction

Abstract

Abstract The kind of metaphysical inquiry we seek in the social context is inevitably drawn to an Aristotelian framework of a hierarchical picture of reality, whereby some aspects of it are more foundational than others. This chapter aims to explain this intuition by utilizing some of the recent literature on grounding and reduction. The main conclusion of the chapter is that we have good reasons to keep the distinction between metaphysical grounding, whereby “A is X in virtue of A being Y,” and identity relations of the type “A just is B” or “to be an F just is to be G,” and that this distinction can be utilized to distinguish between two types of reductive explanations: reduction by way of complete grounding and reduction as metaphysical identity. Subsequent chapters will show that some of the confusions about the possibility of reductive explanations in social ontology can be avoided by relying on this distinction between two types of reduction.