Anchoring, grounding and explanatory laws

Brian Epstein has advanced a powerful and influential argument for the introduction of a novel relation of metaphysical determination called ‘anchoring’ and, correlatively, against identifying anchoring with metaphysical grounding (Epstein, B. 2015. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press). The argument aims to establish this by showing that they have different modal properties: anchoring is a ‘universal tool’, in that it allows for an anchored kind to be instantiated at worlds where its anchors are absent, whereas grounding does not, as it is ‘world-bound’. In this paper, I provide a novel diagnosis of where the argument goes wrong. Contrary to extant responses in the literature, I argue that anchoring can be a form of grounding even if we grant all of Epstein’s key (if controversial) insights. Moreover, I show that Epstein’s reasoning has stronger dialectical force against the related but distinct view that social facts are grounded in rules. Even in this respect, however, I argue that there are good reasons to resist this negative conclusion.