Here are two social explanations. One: Megan is a US citizen because she was born in the USA. Two: Because certain laws hold in the USA, everyone born in the USA is a US citizen. To make sense of social explanations like these, Brian Epstein argues that we must distinguish between two relations of social dependence: grounding and anchoring. Several metaphysicians have criticized the idea that grounding and anchoring are distinct relations. The goal of this paper is to defend anchoring by presenting a theory that avoids the problematic assumption that anchoring is a grounding-like relation. According to the modal theory of anchoring, anchoring is a modality generator (or modal function). Given an anchoring proposition A, there exists a modality [A] that I call an anchoring context. The anchoring context of A tells us what must be true relative to A. Anchoring generates distinctively social modalities.
Abstract