The Paradigm Requirement and the Explanatory Requirement are ultimately fused, and that fusion brings in some extra baggage. The anemic interpretation of the Explanatory Requirement may be all that is needed for the use to which it is put in the Euthyphro, but that is not true of all the passages in which we encounter it.

In the early dialogues, Socrates occasionally imports a presupposition about what can explain something's being F to the effect that what makes things F must itself be F; it makes things F by transmitting its Fness to them. This is the beginning of a theory of causality. Let us call any theory that employs this presupposition a “Transmission Theory” of Causality. The cause, whatever it is, is a “transmitting cause” of other things' being F.

The Theory of Forms is going to incorporate a Transmission Theory of Causality: the Form, the F, will make things F by transmitting its own being F to those things. The Theory of Forms is not unique in this: Aristotle will also advocate a Transmission Theory of Causality, especially in the domain of biology (ἄνθρωπος ἄνθρωπον γεννᾷ: it takes a human being to generate a human being), without Plato's Theory of Forms (Aristotle does, of course, have a theory of forms). So accepting a Transmission Theory does not commit one to Plato's Theory of Forms.

In Aristotle, we may distinguish between two grades of Transmission Theory: a Strong one and a Weak one.