Grounding interventionism: Conceptual and epistemological challenges

Philosophers have recently highlighted substantial affinities between causation and grounding, which have inclined some to import the conceptual and formal resources of causal interventionism into the metaphysics of grounding. The prospect of grounding interventionism raises two important questions: What exactly are grounding interventions, and why should we think they enable knowledge of grounding? This paper approaches these questions by examining how causal interventionists have addressed (or might address) analogous questions and then comparing the available options for grounding interventionism. The paper argues that grounding interventions must be understood in worldly terms, as adding something to or deleting something from the roster of entities, or making some fact obtain or fail to obtain. It considers three bases for counterfactual assessment: imagination, structural equation models, and background theory. The paper concludes that grounding interventionism requires firmer epistemological foundations, without which the interventionist's epistemology of grounding is incomplete and ineffectually rationalist.