The Importance of Being Primitive

Abstract

This chapter concerns primitiveness. Indeed, my way of arguing for or against equivalence claims in the previous chapters largely depends on the nature of primitives and on the role they play in each of the theories involved, and it is now time to be explicit about this. In general, in most metaphysical debates a lot depends on primitives—indeed, metaphysical theories rely heavily on the use of the primitives that they typically appeal to. So, I will emphasize here the utmost importance of primitives in the construction of metaphysical theories and in the subsequent evaluation of them. I will claim that almost all of the explanatory power of metaphysical theories comes from their primitives, and I will scrutinize the notion of “power” and “explanatory”. All together, these points will naturally lead me to defend a global view on the nature of the metaphysical enterprise: what is at stake in metaphysics is to find out not just what there is or what there is not, but what is more fundamental than what—to find out what are the best primitives. Relationships between my view and the current debate concerning the notion of grounding will be discussed.