Genealogical Defeat and Ontological Sparsity

Abstract

When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy make it irrational to hold that belief? According to explanationism, a belief’s genealogy undermines its rational status by revealing the lack of an explanatorily connected between that belief and the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a sparse ontology of worldly facts or states of affairs. I then propose a new “truthmaker” version of explanationism capable of accommodating the possibility of accommodating the possibility of rational belief in ontological sparsity. I close by arguing that, if I am right about the nature of genealogical defeat, then genealogical debunking arguments carry a greater metaphysical burden than has previously been recognized.