Abstract According to the deductive‐nomological account of ground, a fact A grounds another fact B in case the laws of metaphysics determine the existence of B on the basis of the existence of A. Accounts of grounding of this particular variety have already been developed in the literature. My aim in this paper is to sketch a new version of this account. My preferred account offers two main improvements over existing accounts. First, the present account is able to deal with necessitarian as well as non‐necessitarian cases of grounding by acknowledging the existence of two types of metaphysical laws. I will argue that we should assume that metaphysical laws come in the necessitarian as well as in the non‐necessitarian variety—closely paralleling the distinction between strict and non‐strict laws in the philosophy of science. The second main improvement of the present account is that this account is able to provide an explanation of why the laws of metaphysics have a direction built into them. I will argue that we should characterize metaphysical laws with the help of Theodore Sider’s (2011) notion of structure, which is a descendent of David Lewis’s (1983) notion of naturalness. According to the account of metaphysical laws developed in this paper, metaphysical laws express in their antecedents either perfectly structural truths or more structural truths than in their consequents. Since on Sider’s account structural features of reality are fundamental features of reality, the account is able to explain as to why the laws of metaphysics take us from the fundamental to the derivative.

This paper defends a novel truth-conditional theory of racial pejoratives that is distinctive by locating an indexical component in their content. The paper reviews rival theories (which are divided into three main approaches: semantic, pragmatic and prohibition accounts) and sets out some of their main difficulties, with particular focus on the difficulties in explaining the apparent context sensitivity of the content of pejorative expressions. The indexical theory, it is argued, not only avoids these problems but provides a better account of three characteristic features of pejoratives that a satisfactory theory of pejoratives should be able to explain. These are, first, the explosive force that utterances of pejoratives have even in apparently ‘innocent’ uses; second, the apparently non-derogatory use of pejoratives when they are appropriated by the target community; third, the distinctive behaviour of pejoratives in contexts of embedding under verbs of propositional attitude.