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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

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DON’T GET HUNG UP IN THE MIDDLE
 YASH AGARWAL

Grounding is still a relatively young topic for philosophical inquiry amongst con-
temporary analytic philosophers, so there is still a lack of consensus on the subject. 
One unanswered question is the target of grounding: can it be a tool to explain 
reality? Is it a relation like causation or parthood? Among all this uncertainty,there 
seems to be, even at such a young point in the life of grounding as an area of phil-
osophical inquiry, a certain consensus or rather a dichotomy among philosophers. 
I’m talking about the position of the fundamentalia, entity(ies) that are thought by 
foundationalists to ground everything.

Most philosophers take grounding structures to be either top-ist or bottom-ist. 
According to top-ism, everything is immediately or mediately grounded by the 
entity of which everything else is a proper part of. !is entity is usually identi"ed 
with the cosmos. According to bottom-ism everything is immediately or mediately 
grounded by the smallest entities, the mereological atoms, whatever they may be. 
Between top-ism and bottom-ism resides middle-ism, and it means exactly what it 
sounds like. Middle-sized entities constitute the fundamentalia, grounding smaller 
entities through a downward chain (towards the mereological atoms) and larger 
ones through an upward chain (towards the cosmos). !is may sound peculiar at 
"rst but is not quite so when examined closely. Sara Bernstein, in her paper “Could 
a middle level be the most fundamental?” argues for the plausibility of middle-ism. 

In this paper I attempt to show, o#setting Bernstein’s arguments for middle-ism, 
how middle-ism is more problematic than its counterparts, in three ways. In carry-
ing out this project, I don’t think that middleism is just as plausible as top-ism or 



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bottom-ism. Despite this, I concede that taking a closer look at middle-ism and not 
simply dismissing it at the outset has its merits. !is paper tries to be representative 
of that. I have three objections to make. !e "rst one concerns the middle level 
itself and how the middle-sized fundamentalia can occupy neither one level nor 
multiple. !e second one appeals to the unintuitive consequences that middle-ism 
has based on the notion of relative fundamentality. !e third one is based on a 
problem that arises when talking about parthood, about how grounding direction 
goes both from wholes to parts and parts to wholes in middle-ism.

§2 The Middle Level
In this section, I will start o# with a brief discussion of middle-ism and the advantage 
that Bernstein claims middle-ism holds over its rivals. !is will be followed by an 
analysis of the middle level which will show how the middle-sized fundamental 
entities can neither occupy one level, nor multiple levels, that is, a portion of the 
chain. Finally, I will discuss a potential reply that a middle-ist could make and my 
response to it.

Let us look at middle-ism a little more closely. It might seem peculiar or absurd that 
the world would be structured in a way such that it is both ascending (upward chain, 
towards the cosmos) and descending (downward chain, towards mereological atoms) 
instead of either one. But, as Bernstein argues, it is equally imaginable that God, 
instead of going with a top-ist or bottom-ist structure, decided to go with a middle-
ist view. Still, it seems as though it would be harder for God to create the middle-
sized entities and let the smallest and the largest entities fall out of them rather than 
having to create just the mereological atoms since the mereological atoms are clearly 
simpler, more primitive entities. I don’t mention the cosmos here since, in creating 
the cosmos, God would be creating everything and so among the three, creating 
mereological atoms seems to be the easiest.

Bernstein argues that middle level entities like iPhones, toasters, and amoebae 
have an (prima facie) advantage over the fundamental entity(ies) posited by top-
ists (the cosmos) and bottom-ists (mereological atoms). !e advantage being that 
these middle level entities are “perceptually available” and have “rich essences”1 , 
which discourage doubts regarding the nature or the explanatory power of the 
fundamentalia. Middle-sized entities, like a human, instantiate (essential) properties 
like having the exact parents they have, which the cosmos and mereological atoms do 
not. Here, perceptual availability and rich essences are being considered advantages 
since the fundamental entity for the top-ist, the cosmos, cannot be perceived, at least 
not all at once. On the other hand, the fundamental entity for the bottom-ist would 

1 Bernstein, S. “Could a middle level be the most fundamental?”. Philosophical Studies, 2020: pp. 1-15.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

be the mereological atoms, which we have not identi"ed, at least not yet. Even if 
we did come to know of them, they would be out of the reaches of our perceptual 
abilities presumably owing to their small size.

Let us begin by examining the middle level. !e objection is against the advantage 
they supposedly have over the fundamentalia posited by top-ists or bottom-ists, that 
is, of having rich essences and being perceptually available. I object by saying that 
the list of middle level entities is indeterminate. !e consequence of this is that they 
lose the aforementioned advantage of being perceptually available, and so it turns 
out to be a disadvantage. !e question to be asked here is: are these middle-sized 
fundamental entities on the same level or do they occupy multiple levels? !e former 
may seem like the obvious answer since multiple levels would imply a hierarchy, that 
is, one level grounded by ones below it, which would disqualify those entities from 
being fundamental, but I disagree for the following reason. If they are all on the same 
level, one must ask: what happens when a successor of an existing middle level entity 
comes into existence? Say for example, what would happen when the new iPhone 
comes out? A middle-ist might answer that the new iPhone would just be added to 
the list of the middle level entities. !e list is dynamic.

However, the list cannot be dynamic because two models of the iPhone cannot both 
be a part of the same list. !is is because any single model of the iPhone can explain 
all the previous models and the ones to come. Having two entities of the same 
species will result in the fundamentalia having grounds (the older generation being 
a ground for the newer one and vice versa, which is to say that some middle-sized 
entities would ground other middle-sized entities) which would disqualify them as 
fundamentalia altogether. !is disquali"cation I mention is based on the notion of 
independence, as the criteria for what counts as fundamental, as defended by Bennett, 
over the notion of completeness, in her book Making !ings Up. Fundamentality 
as independence, according to Bennett, is simply the idea of being ungrounded. To 
say a thing is fundamental (according to independence) is to say that there are no 
other entities below it that ground it. Completeness on the other hand is the idea 
that the fundamental entities must build everything above them. It does not specify 
that they must be ungrounded2. Going back to the question of the fundamentalia 
occupying one level, the issue is not only that the fundamentalia would be grounded 
but also that an entity and its grounds cannot be on the same level of fundamentality. 
!is might be clear for artifacts but let us consider a non-artifact too. For example, 
a progeny has the genetic material to trace its family tree upward and downward.

!erefore, since middle-sized objects cannot all occupy one level, it seems as though 
they must occupy multiple levels, that is, a portion of the chain will constitute the 
fundamentalia, which is absurd. I say it is absurd because of two reasons. First, 

2 Bennett, K. “Making !ings Up”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017: pp. 141-160.



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there would remain no de"nite quali"cation that dictates which levels count as 
fundamentalia and which do not. For example, with the addition of new levels due 
to inventions or births of new members such as the latest iPhone, or an amoeba 
undergoing cell division, there will not be any reason su$cient to make the cuto# at 
a speci"c level rather than the level right before or after it. Since the list of middle-
sized fundamentalia isn’t determinate, one risks having to call all levels fundamental, 
in which case the notion of fundamentality becomes too expansive to be meaningful. 
!is makes it hard to pinpoint from exactly which level onwards do entities stop 
counting as fundamental. It becomes an instance of the infamous Sorites paradox 
(Hyde, Dominic, and Diana Ra#man, SEP) like the infamous sand heap problem 
where there is no distinct point when a heap of sand, during the removal of grains 
of sand one-by-one, stops being a heap3. Second, going by Bennett’s account of 
independence as the criterion for what counts as fundamental, a portion of the chain 
won’t be fundamental since the entities wouldn’t be ungrounded. Here, the middle-
ist might prefer the completeness picture of fundamentality, but I follow Bennett 
in her arguments for independence over completeness, and so, devote no further 
discussion on it.

Another prima facie objection against middle-ism is the idea that middle sized objects 
are objects that can come into existence at any time between the beginning and the 
end of the universe’s life. For example, trees, rocks, and humans all pop in and out of 
existence at multiple times in the universe’s timeline. !is is not the case for top-ism 
or bottom-ism. !e cosmos and mereological atoms aren’t something that can cease 
to exist and reappear during a universe’s life. !ey are metaphysical, mysterious, out 
of our reach, or other-worldly. But in the case of middle-ism, the fundamentalia are 
rather short lived; they are transitory.

!rough this objection, I have shown how the supposed advantage of being 
perceptually available and having rich essences held by middle-sized fundamentalia 
in middle-ism is actually a disadvantage because middle-sized entities are readily 
perceivable and conceivable. !ey are not mysterious or unknown entities. It is a 
disadvantage because of the problems that arise when looking at the question about 
them occupying one level or multiple levels.

To the problems raised above, a middle-ist might reply that this issue, that of one or 
many levels, is not unique to middle-ism and hence does not disqualify it or make 
it less plausible than its counterparts. Even for top-ism or bottom-ism, we do not 
know for sure whether the fundamentalia populate one or many levels. !is idea has 
been discussed by Jonathon Scha#er in his paper Is !ere a Fundamental Level? and 
T.E. Tahko in his paper Boring In"nite Descent. Maybe, what we might believe to be 
mereological atoms are grounded in quantum energy "elds which are grounded in 

3 Nolan, D. “Cosmic loops”. Reality and its structures: Essays in fundamentality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2017: pp. 91-105.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

smaller and smaller portions of the same "elds. In such a case it is equally unclear, as in 
the case of middle-ism, where to draw the line for what counts as fundamental. Also, 
what comes right above the mereological atoms is unclear. Again, it seems unlikely 
that right above the mereological atoms would there be something clearly perceivable 
like an iPhone or a washing machine. It might be something like a cluster of 
mereological atoms, or rather, something built by mereological atoms but still equally 
imperceptible and with an essence almost as scant as a single mereological atom. 
Similarly, for top-ism, what comes just below something like the cosmos is not clear. 
It seems unlikely that right below the cosmos there would be something perceptual, 
or easily comprehensible, like say, a toaster. It would probably be something along 
the lines of the universe-minus-one-atom. !e problem raised against middle-ism, 
that of where to draw the line, is present for the counterparts too, especially for 
bottom-ism, since there is not just one but many of these ‘atoms’ ful"lling the role of 
fundamentalia. Since there isn’t a clear quali"cation in top-ism and bottom-ism that 
tells us why the fundamentalia are the way they are, it is not something that should 
devalue middle-ism as a plausible candidate to explain grounding structures.

To the middle-ist’s reply, I concede that the problem, in the way she puts it: that we 
do not know what comes right below the cosmos or right above the mereological 
atoms either but, there is a determined line for top-ism and bottom-ism. !e cosmos 
and the mereological atoms are entities which are determined as fundamental. Not 
knowing what might come right next to them does not matter since the fundamentalia 
are clearly de"ned. !is is not the case for the middle-sized entities since the list of 
fundamentalia is itself indeterminate, and as shown above, they can neither occupy 
one level nor multiple levels.

§3 Relative Fundamentality
In this section, I will show how, if one chooses to accept middle-ism, it results in an 
absurd conclusion. To do this, I will use Werner’s account of relative fundamentality 
and then discuss a potential objection the middle-ist can make. Finally, I will use 
Werner’s theory to dismiss that reply. !e middle-ist can still attempt to argue for 
middle-ism by taking another route, which I will also argue against.

As shown in §2, the middle-sized fundamentalia cannot occupy the same level due 
to the problem of entities of similar species, like newer generations of iPhones. 
Despite this, a middle-ist might still argue that middle-sized fundamentalia do 
occupy one level by including only the "rst member of any species of entities, like 
the "rst-generation iPhone, but this too, I argue, is not possible for the following 
reason. 

It is obvious that all the mereological atoms would be at the same level since they 
are identical. But, having perceptually available middle-level entities (even if it is 



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only "rst-generations that count as fundamental) such as iPhones and toasters on 
the same level create a problem. My objection is that accepting middle-ism would 
lead one to the conclusion that all the mereological atoms do not lie on the same 
level of fundamentality. !is comes about as follows. Let us take an iPhone and a 
toaster to be among the middle-sized entities that are part of the fundamentalia. 
It is obvious that an iPhone is more complex than a toaster, whether that is in 
terms of merely the number of components involved in its assembly, the scienti"c 
complexity, or the level of engineering that has gone behind the product. So, from 
the di#erence in the natures and complexities of these two middle sized entities at 
hand, it follows that the number of steps of immediate grounding it takes to reach 
down to the level of the mereological atoms would be di#erent. !e number of 
steps from the iPhone to a mereological atom would be more than that from the 
toaster to the mereological atom. For example, the steps from the iPhone would 
be as such: iPhone; motherboard; integrated CPU; CPU; GPU; silicon lattice 
structure; silicon atoms…… mereological atoms. !e steps from the toaster would 
be as such: Toaster; heating coil; copper atoms…… mereological atoms. Hence, we 
arrive at the conclusion that the mereological atoms are not all on the same level of 
fundamentality, which is absurd. And so, the middle-ist cannot say that the middle-
sized fundamental entities occupy one level.

!e middle-ist, adamant on her stance, might still argue that the middle-sized 
fundamental entities do occupy one level. !is she justi"es by saying that one can 
take di#erent numbers of steps from the fundamentalia and yet get to the same 
level of fundamentality. Which is to say that one could take a di#erent number 
of steps of immediate grounding to go from the fundamental level to that of the 
mereological atoms in di#erent cases, as shown with that of the iPhone and the 
toaster.

!is violates the account of relative fundamentality as drawn out by Werner. 
Roughly, on his account, relative fundamentality can be measured by counting 
down the number of steps of full immediate grounding it takes from the entity 
or node at hand, to the fundamental entity or entities (depending on how many 
fundamentalia one takes there to be)4. It is a violation of this account since 
despite the move made by the middle-ist which puts the mereological atoms at 
the same level by taking di#erent number of steps from the fundamental level, the 
mereological atoms arrived at in both the cases, via the iPhone and via the toaster, 
would have di#erent values or degrees of relative fundamentality. !is is due to 
there being di#erent numbers of steps between them and the fundamental level. At 
this point the middle-ist can take one of two paths.

4 Werner, J. “A grounding-based measure of relative fundamentality”. Synthese, 2020: pp. 1-17.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

!e "rst path the middle-ist could take is that she can accept the violation of 
Werner’s account of relative fundamentality and take there to be indiscrete levels 
of fundamentality. !is will allow the middle-ist to place two mereological atoms 
at the same level of fundamentality even though there are di#erent steps between 
them and the fundamental level. !is makes the levels indiscrete because equal 
lengths, the toaster-mereological atom and the iPhone-mereological atom, would 
have an unequal number of levels of fundamentality. My only response to this 
would be that it is overly bold to reject the best account of relative fundamentality 
we have in order to accommodate an already suspicious middle-ist structure of 
grounding, especially when no alternative has been given to explain the notion of 
relative fundamentality, let alone one as elaborate as Werner’s.

!e second path the middle-ist can take draws on the idea of plural grounding from 
Shamik Dasgupta’s On the plurality of grounds. !e idea is that a certain set of facts 
would together ground another fact without any one or many of the facts from the 
set being su$cient for the explanation of the grounded fact5. Following from this, 
the middle-ist could say that the middle-sized fundamentalia ground everything 
above and below. One cannot get any more speci"c than this and so, pinpointing 
which middle-sized fundamentalia are grounding the grounded entity at hand is 
consequently not possible.

I would reply to this with a di#erent proposal, which eventually fails, like before, 
due to Werner’s notion of relative fundamentality. My proposal is a modi"cation of 
Werner’s notion of arbitrary grounding, which he talks about in his paper Arbitrary 
grounding. 

Arbitrary grounding says that if we have a speci"c set of grounders, #, we cannot 
specify which groundee g they will ground among a group of groundees gg. 
Borrowing Werner’s example, if there are two identical doughnuts a and b on a 
table and you were to pick one, there is no speci"c reason why you pick, say, a over 
b. It’s an arbitrary choice. With the # at hand, one cannot pinpoint which groundee 
will emerge. So, for any given set of grounders, we cannot specify the groundee.

My proposal involves %ipping the position of non-speci"city in arbitrary 
grounding. !e middle-ist could say that for any speci"c groundee, one cannot 
specify the grounder(s). So, if we talk about mereological atoms, one cannot claim 
which speci"c grounder(s) any mereological atom(s) came from. Did a particular 
mereological atom come from an iPhone or a toaster? One can never tell. !e 
only thing that can be said is that the mereological atom(s) is grounded by the 
middle-sized fundamentalia. But this proposal runs into trouble. Even if we cannot 
specify which middle-sized entity is grounding which mereological atom(s), two 
mereological atoms coming from di#erent middle-sized entities, even though 

5 Dasgupta, Shamik. “On the Plurality of Grounds”. Philosophers' Imprint, 2014.



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unknowable which, can still be on di#erent levels of fundamentality with no 
explanation as to why that is the case. !is is problematic for Werner’s account of 
relative fundamentality as noted earlier, so this proposal must be rejected too.

In the end, maybe the Dasguptian view proposed earlier could be the answer for 
the middle-ist to hold on to, but this view is just too generic and lacks explanatory 
power. It gives us no information apart from the idea that middle-sized entities 
ground the smaller and larger entities, which is circular since that is exactly the 
de"nition of middle-ism.

!is Dasguptian proposal is similar to an approach that is implicit in Kevin 
Richardson’s paper On What (In General) Grounds What. !e idea is that one should 
not take speci"c instances, as I do with the iPhone and the toaster. We should build 
from a generalized picture, starting with a broader idea and then extrapolating 
that to speci"c cases. For example, when talking about middle-sized fundamental 
entities, start by taking all of them at the same level since they are fundamental, 
or rather, equifundamental. In other words, we should go from broad categories 
to narrow cases to ensure that the central idea, that the middle-sized entities are 
fundamental, remains intact, and consequently that those entitites would be 
equifundamental, occupying one level. I object by saying that we must do exactly 
the opposite. It is a bad strategy to go from the broad to the narrow since the 
generalization can lead to dismissal of cases that are actually counterexamples to 
the broader idea. We must build from the narrow, speci"c cases, and only when we 
have enough narrow cases to build a generalized picture should we translate that 
notion to the broader picture. It would be wrong to start o# with a set-in-stone 
idea and try to force individual cases to conform to it instead of building up the 
idea based on the speci"c cases. Bennett also endorses this idea in her book Making 
!ings Up. She argues that singular claims are prior to generalizations. Broad 
claims, like # ground the gg, are reached by quantifying or generalizing which do 
not provide a reason to believe them. Rather, singular claims, like this mouse is 
grounded by complex proteins, are what are true6.

§4 Parthood
In this section, I will make my "nal objection against middle-ism based on an 
issue that arises for the middle-ist when thinking of the direction of grounding and 
parthood. !e issue is that a middle-ist, in trying to avoid simultaneously taking 
opposite monistic and pluralistic stances, would still have to take restricted versions 
of monism and pluralism to be true, which is problematic. Like before, I will follow 
this objection with a potential reply from a middle-ist, and my response to it.

6 Bennett, K. “Making things up”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017: pp. 141-160.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Before we get into my objection, let me clarify the way in which I am using the 
terms monism and pluralism since these terms can have di#erent connotations 
in di#erent contexts. For my purposes, a monist, or rather a priority monist, is 
someone who takes wholes to be prior to their parts and a pluralist, or a priority 
pluralist, takes parts to be prior to the whole that they are a part of.

!is objection stems from the di#erence between monism and pluralism. In 
middle-ism, middle-sized entities acting as the fundamentalia would have to 
satisfy the conditions that are demanded both by the monist and the pluralist. 
Let me explain using an example. Almost every smartphone nowadays has an 
integrated chip, that is, they have multiple components like the CPU, the GPU, 
antennae, memory cards, etc. all soldered together onto one chip that runs the 
entire smartphone. For a monist, the smartphone would be prior to the integrated 
chip which would then be prior to the individual components of the chip. For a 
pluralist, the individual components would be prior to the integrated chip which 
would then be prior to the smartphone. So, the problem for middle-ism is that the 
middle-sized fundamentalia have to come prior to both the larger and the smaller 
entities, that is, the integrated chip will have to be prior to both the smartphone 
and the individual components of the chip. In other words, the middle-sized 
entities, in some sense, have a higher function to perform as the fundamentalia for 
middle-ism than in the case of the counterparts.

Middle-ists have to ground the chain in two directions which would mean, in 
some sense, that they have to possess the explanatory power of mereological atoms 
in a bottom-ist structure (upward chain) and the cosmos in a top-ist structure 
(downward chain). One might ask at this point: where is the objection here? !e 
integrated chip having to be prior to both the smartphone and the individual 
components is just the de"nition of middle-ism, that is, the middle-sized entities 
grounding the smaller and the bigger ones. In a way, yes! But the point I am trying 
to make is that middle-ism is more complicated than top-ism and bottom-ism in 
trying to ground both larger and smaller entities, and there is not su$cient reason 
for why this extra complication is needed. In other words, being a middle-ist, one 
cannot also be a proponent of priority monism or priority pluralism.

!e middle-ist would have to (individually) deny both parts-ground-wholes 
and whole-grounds-parts and take some restricted version to accommodate 
their stance. She might do this by quantifying, maybe based on size or level of 
relative fundamentality, which portion of the grounding picture must follow 
the parts-ground-whole order and which must follow the whole-grounds-parts 
order. But this quanti"cation is also problematic for the same reason as was the 
fundamentalia occupying multiple levels. !ere would be no exact quali"cation 
by which the middle-ist can pinpoint exactly where the middle-sized entities stop 
being fundamental. As a result, middle-ism violates the Occam’s razor principle 



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which says that one should prefer the simplest explanation for anything and only 
complicate the explanation if needed7. Middle-ism, in trying to explain reality 
through grounding structures, further complicates our understanding without 
providing new insight relative to its two counterparts.

!e middle-ist could have said that the advantage that middle-sized fundamentalia 
possess, that of being perceptually available and having rich essences, justi"es the 
complication, but as I have shown in the second section those traits are actually 
disadvantages. She might in turn use a similar strategy as earlier by saying that 
since the explanatory powers or abilities that the cosmos or the mereological atoms 
possess are still beyond us, that is, we do not have knowledge of what they are, it 
is equally plausible that there be middle-sized objects possess explanatory powers 
such that they can ground things above and below them. Maybe God decided to 
make the world such that middle-sized entities qualify as fundamentalia. Hence, 
the problem regarding the higher ask for the fundamentalia in middle-ism, that 
of grounding larger entities going up and smaller ones going down, does not 
necessarily make it any less plausible than its counterparts.

Again, I reply that the problem raised may not be unique to middle-ism, but there 
are de"nitely higher hurdles for middle-ism to overcome, like those highlighted 
in sections two and three, due to the disadvantage they possess, that of their 
perceptually availability and rich essences.

§5 Conclusion
In this paper I have shown three ways in which middle-ism is a less favorable method 
of grounding compared to its counterparts, namely top-ism and bottom-ism. !e 
overarching problem that leads, in one way or another, to all my objections is the 
supposed advantage of perceptual availability and rich essences in middle-sized 
entities, that Bernstein appeals to, which I have shown to be a disadvantage. !e 
perceptual availability and rich essences possessed by the middle-sized fundamentalia 
makes their nature clear, or at least clearer, than the counterparts, namely the cosmos 
and mereological atoms. Since this clarity, that of perceptual availability and rich 
essences, is achieved, middle-ism faces problems such as those shown in this paper.

One can look at it from an epistemic lens. It is very likely that we never come to know 
what the structure of the world is and so, I concede that saying that God could very 
well have structured the world on the basis of middle-sized entities could be just as 
plausible as saying that the sun, tomorrow, will rise in the west rather than the east. 
Still, I think the problems I raise against middle-ism show, at the very least, that it is 
a view less plausible than its counterparts.

7 Baker & Alan, “Simplicity”, !e Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

REFERENCES
Baker, Alan, “Simplicity”, !e Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 

2016 Edition),

Edward N. Zalta(ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/
eimplicity/

Bernstein, S. 2020. “Could a middle level be the most fundamental?”. 
Philosophical Studies, pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-
01484-1

 Bennett, K. 2017. “Making things up”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 
141-160.

Dasgupta, Shamik. 2014. “On the Plurality of Grounds”. Philosophers' 
Imprint.

Hyde, Dominic, and Diana Ra#man, “Sorites Paradox”, !e Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.), 
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entreis/sorites-paradox/ 

Nolan, D. 2018. “Cosmic loops”. Reality and its structures: Essays in 
fundamentality. 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91-105.

Richardson, K. 2020. “On What (In General) Grounds What”. Metaphysics, 
3(1), pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5334/met.18

Scha#er, Jonathon. 2003. “Is there a fundamental level”. University of 
Massachusetts, Amherst. Blackwell Publishing Inc.

Tahko, Tuomas E. 2014. “Boring in"nite descent”. Metaphilosophy.

Werner, J. 2020. “A grounding-based measure of relative fundamentality”. 
Synthese, pp. 1-17. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02676-2

Werner, J. 2021. “Arbitrary grounding”. Philosophical Studies, pp. 1-21. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01699-w


