 An important initial choice point in theorizing about grounding concerns the theses of unionism and separatism (Raven 2015: 326). Proponents of unionism work with an explanation-based conception of grounding, stipulating that grounding is a form of explanation, what we will call explanationG (Dasgupta 2017; Fine 2012a; Litland 2015; Rosen 2010). For unionists, to say that the bowl’s brittleness is grounded in the ionic bonds of its constituent atoms is, in the first instance, to say that the bowl is brittle because these bonds are ionic, that it’s brittle in virtue of the ionic bonding, or that the brittleness is accounted for by the bonding.