 Finally, there are also those who are sceptical about the metaphysical import of notions of ontological dependence. There are several reasons why one might consider ontological dependence relations to be unintelligible or unhelpful; for instance, one might think that they conflate other relations or that they are extraneous additions to being. However, it is commonly held among those working with ontological dependence that these dependence relations, being formal ontological relations, are not additional elements of being (cf. Lowe 2006: Ch. 3). Such relations are typically thought to be internal (see Armstrong 1978: 85, who defines two things to be internally related if and only if there exist properties of them which logically necessitate that the relation holds; for further discussion on internal and external relations, see the separate entry on  relations).  Still, there is at least an ideological cost in some approaches to ontological dependence and hence some would prefer a deflationary approach. According to this type of approach, we may be able to account for supposed ontological dependence relations in terms of a “cluster” of modal and mereological relations (for a defense of this type of approach, see Kovacs 2018).