Must There Be Something Fundamental?

This is a post by Markel Kortabarria (University of Barcelona).

It is a commonsense belief that reality is built from the ground up. At its base lie the fundamental building blocks that serve as a foundation for everything else. This belief is largely shaped by the dominant scientific view in physics, which suggest that every object is made up of fundamental particles. Philosophically, the view is reminiscent of the ancient atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, as well as Leibniz’s theory of monads—simple, indivisible substances that form the foundation of every other substance. The foundationalist image is also familiar to the religious mind of those who think that what is fundamental is God, who one day decided to set all of this in motion. Back to philosophy, Spinoza defended the idea that the primary substance is God, which he identified with the entirety of nature, and Jonathan Schaffer, moving away from the divine, has revived similar monistic ideas, arguing that what is truly fundamental is the whole entangled cosmos.

Whatever the view, the general idea is that reality is hierarchically structured into layers ranging from the absolutely fundamental to the various derivative levels containing social, psychological, biological, and other facts. Indeed, many metaphysicians believe that reality follows an order of ontological priority: derivative facts are ontologically dependent on or grounded in facts at the more fundamental levels, with such chains of dependence terminating in some fundamental fact(s) which are ontologically independent or ungrounded. This view is referred to as metaphysical foundationalism. What’s more, many of these metaphysicians believe that metaphysical foundationalism is necessary: reality could not consist of an infinite descent of ever-more-fundamental facts. In other words, metaphysical infinitism is not possible.

But is this so? Must there be something fundamental? Beyond elusive appeals to intuitions, metaphysical foundationalists typically offer two kinds of arguments for the existence of fundamental facts: virtue-theoretic arguments and arguments from vicious infinite regress. Let’s start with the former.

Those who put forward virtue-theoretic arguments hold that metaphysical foundationalism offers a simpler and more unified picture of the world than theories that deny that reality bottoms out at some fundamental level. By dispensing with the fundamental, metaphysical infinitists incur a heavy theoretical cost, namely they lose the ability to give a common explanation of the obtaining of all dependent facts.

However, it’s not clear that metaphysical foundationalism is the more virtuous option. For one thing, the theory doesn’t specify the number or type of entities at the fundamental level. It also introduces an additional category of facts—the fundamental ones. And while metaphysical foundationalism offers a unified explanation for all dependent facts, it does so at the cost of positing unexplained brute facts. Even so, virtue-based arguments offer, at best, reasons in favour of theory choice, and are not capable of establishing whether a metaphysical theory is true (or false), let alone necessarily true (or false). Something more is needed to rule out the possibility of metaphysical infinitism, which brings us to the second type of argument.

Several philosophers have suggested that metaphysical infinitism entails a vicious regress. If reality is a descent of ontologically ever-dependent entities, we never arrive to a bottom level that can guarantee the existence of such entities in the first place. Accordingly, the argument from vicious infinite regress views metaphysical infinitism as exhibiting a kind of metaphysical failure: by subtracting the fundamental fact(s) from the grounds of every other fact, infinitists are said to render the grounds of such facts metaphysically insufficient.

Still, the target of this insufficiency claim can vary depending on one’s interpretation of the regress. Specifically, the argument can take two different perspectives on the regress. What we might call the local perspective focuses on the existence of the particular dependent facts that make up the infinite chain, while the global perspective focuses on the existence of the entire collection of dependent facts that is the infinite chain. From the local perspective, the metaphysical foundationalist diagnoses a lack of sufficient grounds for each dependent fact, whereas from the global perspective the metaphysical foundationalist diagnoses a lack of sufficient grounds for the entire collection of dependent facts.

Does any of these constructions of the regress show that metaphysical infinitism is not possible? Here are some difficulties why one might think that this is not the case.

One way of understanding the local regress is to argue that each dependent fact obtains in virtue of a metaphysical base that includes all the facts beneath it, a base that without the fundamental fact(s) is incomplete. However, metaphysicians do not typically think of such chains of dependency in this way. It is one thing to say that A is metaphysically dependent on a single base that includes B, C, D, and so on. It is quite another to say that A is metaphysically dependent on B, which is metaphysically dependent on C, and so on. Both metaphysical foundationalists and infinitists conceive of dependent facts in the latter way. Reality is staggered but it is not the case that each step has every other step as an element.

A more plausible interpretation views metaphysical infinitism as failing to provide an ultimate ground for each dependent fact. The idea is that such a ground is needed to kickstart the chain. Unfortunately, the force of this argument weakens once we realize that it is only a disguised demand for the fundamental. The claim that the existence of each dependent fact requires that there must be some ultimate ground is the very claim that there must be some non-dependent fact(s) that can explain the obtaining of every other fact. Simply re-framing the fundamental as ultimate is not an argument.

As for the global perspective, one important question concerns the nature of the collection. We might think of it as a set, a conjunction, or a plurality. However, none of these constructions seem to offer much help, as we typically accept non-problematic cases of such infinitely large collections (think of natural numbers). Moreover, blaiming viciousness on the infinite extension of the collection begs the question against the metaphysical infinitist, since the very possibility of such a collection is what is at stake.

Another strategy is to ask what explains that there are dependent facts rather than none. What explains that there are any flamingos? Pointing out that there were other flamingos seems deeply off track, since the question concerns the existence of the kind. Perhaps the same is true of dependent facts. Note, however, that the previous question concerns the instantiation of a causal kind. In explaining why there are any flamingos, we have prior knowledge about the nature of the kind which entails that flamingos are causally dependent upon some non-flamingo stuff. But why assume that intuitions about causal kinds transfer to non-causal kinds? Unlike the case of flamingos, it does not seem to follow simply from the nature of dependent facts that there must be non-dependent facts, for all dependent facts entail is that they are dependent!

In sum, the belief that reality has a fundamental base is widespread. Metaphysical foundationalists often extend this idea arguing that reality could not be infinite. I’ve outlined some reasons why these arguments might be worth doubting.

If you’d like to explore this further, check out my article “Is it possible to do without the fundamental?” which appeared this year in Philosophia. The article is available for free here.

My work on this article has been supported by María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence grant CEX2021-001169-M (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).

Markel Kortabarria is a predoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona where he works as a member of BIAP and the LOGOS group. His research focuses on the notion of metaphysical grounding, its applicability and its relation to other notions such as fundamentality and metaphysical explanation.