What Is Conservatism?

Abstract

One day, some years ago, Daniel Z. Korman looked out of the window and saw a dog and a tree. He drew the following, apparently reasonable conclusions: there is a dog out there; there is a tree out there; there is a trunk of the tree out there, which partly composes the tree; and there is nothing out there which is composed of the trunk and the dog. Are these reasonable conclusions true? The view Korman calls conservatism1 says yes: there are trees, trunks and dogs, but no trogs, where a trog is an object composed of a trunk and a dog. Conservatism is not exhausted by appeal to these particular kinds of things. The general view concerns which highly visible (2), material (25) objects there are. According to the conservative, there are ordinary objects, like dogs, trunks, tables, cars and the like; but no extraordinary objects, like trogs, incars2 or snowdiscalls (23).3