It is a widespread assumption that scientific progress means finding more basic constituents. It is certainly the received view. This is the common scientific meaning of fundamentality. It is a metaphysical assumption, and drives other assumptions, such as the idea that physics (elementary particle physics, or something like it) should (and can) furnish a complete account of the world: any and all things should be traceable back to the fundamental layer. This paper seeks to pull apart this assumption a little. I suggest that the physicist's version of it might have something to do with the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the description of laws. Ultimately, however, we find that fundamentalism (as a stance) does not demand the elementary particle physicist's more micro-reductive approach, and there are several possible avenues one might take towards `being a fundamentalist' in physics---some of these are well known, others perhaps not so.
Dean Rickles