A third line follows: any demand for a ground of the structural Conditions is made from inside the very framework it seeks to stand outside. Grounding, explanation, and condition are not neutral tools that can be deployed prior to Temporality, Spatiality, and Physicality. Each names, in a different register, an asymmetric directed relation, a relation between distinct relata, and a dependency-stability that holds the relation in place: the abstract analogues, at the level any grounding relation operates, of T, S, and Φ as introduced at [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>).

The contemporary grounding literature (Fine -(Fine, Kit, 2012), Schaffer -(Schaffer, Jonathan, 2009), Rosen -(Rosen, Gideon, 2010)) treats metaphysical grounding as primitive, non-causal, and hyperintensional, distinct from causal grounding precisely by not requiring temporal succession or physical media. The line here does not contest that distinction. It claims something compatible: even on the primitive / non-causal / hyperintensional reading, metaphysical grounding still requires an asymmetric directed relation (the ground is prior to the grounded; the relation does not run in reverse), distinct relata (the ground is not identical to the grounded), and dependency-stability (the grounding relation holds rather than dissolving across the dependency). These are the abstract analogues of T, S, and Φ, generalizations of the [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>) roles to the level at which they apply to atemporal, non-causal, hyperintensional grounding. A grounding relation stripped of all three (non-directed, between non-distinct relata, with no dependency-stability) is not a grounding relation at all but a label without content. The grounding literature's distinction from causal grounding does not strip the abstract analogues; it relocates them to the level where directionality is ontological priority rather than clock-time succession, and where dependency-stability is the holding of the grounding relation rather than the physical persistence of a causal medium.

*What is foreclosed.* The regress cannot get started. Not because the argument declines to answer it, but because the structural Conditions are the conditions under which the concept of an external ground is possible. Necessity, on this picture, is not a property that attaches to the Conditions from outside and requires its own explanation. It is what it means for something to be the constitutive condition of grounding itself. The demand for further explanation is not merely unanswered here. It is structurally unavailable.

The payoff for the formal proof is immediate. The entailments running from the Cartesian certainty of change's possibility through the structural requirement are not merely conceptual. The concepts doing the work are constitutive of the essences they name. Conceiving change correctly and describing what change must be are not two operations separated by a gap; the second is what the first consists in. The proof walks through that closure rather than arguing around it.

The form of reasoning has a distinguished recent lineage. Apel's transcendental-pragmatics -(Apel, Karl-Otto, 1976) and Habermas's discourse ethics -(Habermas, Jürgen, (1983) 1990) share the deep structure: any speech act that would deny the preconditions of speech instantiates those preconditions in the act of denial. Stroud -(Stroud, Barry, 1968) remains the canonical analysis of the form and its limits.

The argument here is not transcendental-pragmatic in the Apel/Habermas sense: it does not run from the conditions of communication to norms of discourse, but from the conditions of grounding to the structural Conditions any grounding relation requires. What the family of arguments shares is the closure move: the critic's denial must instantiate the framework the critic purports to step outside. Stroud's caveat (that transcendental arguments establish only that we must believe the Conditions hold, not that they actually do) is handled at the ontological level in [§2.2.2](<2.2.2 Actuality's Reach.md>) by level-invariance; the performative closure here is its complement at the local level.[^2-4-3-grounding-demand-ch4]

[^2-4-3-grounding-demand-ch4]: The grounding-demand closure (that any demand for a ground of the structural Conditions is made from inside the framework it seeks to stand outside) is engaged in Chapter 4. The further-grounding demand runs explicitly in the First Cause / cosmological argument ([§5.1.2](<5.1.2 Cosmological Argument.md>)) and in the demand for a rational ground of logic ([§5.1.9](<5.1.9 Transcendental Argument.md>)). The methodologically closest contemporary neighbor is Pizzi's impossibility of nothingness, which reaches the same modal floor by truth-maker, semantic, and Kripke-frame reductios ([§4.1.11](<4.1.11 Pizzi's Impossibility of Nothingness.md>)), and ontic structural realism engages the abstract analogues of T, S, and Φ from the relational side via the relations-before-relata line ([§4.3.9](<4.3.9 Structural Realism.md>)).


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← [2.4.2 Structural Gap](<2.4.2 Structural Gap.md>) | [2.4.4 Something Must Be](<2.4.4 Something Must Be.md>) →
