Metaphysical foundationalists hold that grounding has an explanatory role and that this role can be fulfilled only if there are fundamental entities. Accordingly, anti-foundationalist views face a charge of explanatory failure: without a fundamental level, certain explanatory demands go unmet. Recently, Cameron (2022) has challenged the assumption that grounding is inherently explanatory. If this argument succeeds, it provides the anti-foundationalist a way to resist the foundationalist’s charge by severing the connection between grounding and explanation. In this talk, I defend foundationalism against this strategy in two ways. First, I show that Cameron’s objections stem from a conflation of distinct explanatory claims and, at times, from misidentification of the direction of the grounding relation. Once we correct these issues, the link between grounding and explanation is successfully preserved. Second, I show that detaching explanation from grounding carries significant theoretical costs: it weakens grounding’s ability to play its central structuring role in metaphysics and blurs its identity, rendering it indistinguishable from other dependence relations. Finally, I argue that separating grounding from explanation undermines our understanding of the nature of grounding itself and exposes it to skeptical concerns about its intelligibility.
