Abstract The fact that it is essential that p in some sense explains that p . This paper makes one negative and one positive contribution. Negatively, the paper argues that the sense of explanation is not ground , and we prove—contra Vogt—that the issue has nothing to do with whether one works with a representational or worldly notion of ground. Positively, the paper proposes an inferentialist account of essence and uses that to develop an account of essentialist explanation.
Litland et al. (Tue,) studied this question.