Ontological Parsimony Research Articles

Dated Truths Without Dated Powers

AbstractDispositionalism is the theory of modality according to which all (metaphysical and natural) modal truths are made true by some actual irreducibly dispositional property. The relationship between Dispositionalism and time is yet to be satisfactorily explored. In this paper we contribute to this task by examining how Dispositionalism deals with ‘dated truths’: propositions involving a specific time, e.g. “It might rain at 12.30”. We examine two possible accounts: the first, 'Dated Manifestations Strategy', is the idea that powers are very fine-grained, and tend towards temporally very specific manifestations. We argue that such strategy should not be adopted, for it leads to unnecessary violations of ontological parsimony; it is unable to accommodate an ontology of platonic universals; and it is incapable of offering a principled explanation of the forward-looking nature of powers. We offer an alternative account, the "Duration Strategy", which relies on an independently determined arrow of time and the existence of some “duration facts” that specify how long a power takes to bring about its manifestation. We argue that the Duration Strategy is to be preferred. We then flesh out the account by exploring the connection between powers, duration facts, and processes.

Something Negative about Totality Facts

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative.

Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

AbstractRecent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an analogy between scientific and philosophical practice, in order to float one role for historical scholarship that is nonreplicable and noncontingent. It has long been acknowledged that cognitive values – features of theories that facilitate understanding, such as ontological parsimony, ideological simplicity, computational ease and fecundity – play a key role within science. The role of some of these values within philosophy also has received attention but left understudied are the values of novelty and conservativeness. These values influence theory choice, the selection of methodology, the setting of research agenda, and the presentation of results; and are best assessed with a historically informed evaluation. This role for historical scholarship is not replicable by nonhistorical methods, and is not contingent on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions.

Metaphysical Emergence

<i>Metaphysical Emergence</i>

Getting Real: Ockham on the Human Contribution to the Nature and Production of Artifacts

Given his known predilection for ontological parsimony, Ockham’s ontology of artifacts is unsurprisingly reductionist: artifacts are nothing over and above their existing and appropriately ordered parts. However, the case of artifacts is notable in that they are real objects that human artisans produce by bringing about a real change: they spatially rearrange existing natural thing(s) or their parts for the sake of some end. This article argues that the human contribution to the nature and production of artifacts is two-fold: (1) the artisan’s cognitive grasp of her expertise and her decision to deploy that expertise are the two efficient causes necessary to explain the existence of an artifact, and (2) the purpose that the artisan had in mind when she decided to make an artifact fixes the function(s) of the artifact such that an artisan’s purpose is the final cause necessary to explain what an artifact is. Artifacts indeed exist, owing what they are and that they are to intelligent and volitional human activity, which Ockham never denies. The article submits that a myopic focus on Ockham’s indisputable reductionism does not exhaust what is metaphysically interesting and relevant about artifacts.

Theoretical Virtues: Do Scientists Think What Philosophers Think They Ought to Think?

AbstractTheoretical virtues play an important role in the acceptance and belief of theories in science and philosophy. Philosophers have well-developed views on which virtues ought and ought not to influence one’s acceptance and belief. But what do scientists think? This paper presents the results of a quantitative study with scientists from the natural and social sciences and compares their views to those held by philosophers. Some of the more surprising results are: (i) all three groups have a preference order regarding theoretical virtues, making theory choice a much more determinate matter than what has sometimes been suggested; (ii) the preference orders are very similar for the three groups; (iii) simplicity is viewed as an epistemic virtue particularly by social scientists (but not by philosophers); and (iv) syntactic parsimony is preferred to ontological parsimony by all three groups.

MELLOR’S QUESTION

Abstract One can distinguish two basic competing theories of determinables that address Mellor’s Question, implicitly if not explicitly. On the second-order theory, determinables are second-order properties of determinate properties; on the second-level theory, determinables are first-order properties of the particulars with these determinate properties. Given that ontological parsimony is vital to metaphysics, it is of utmost importance which of the two theories is true. Firstly, the paper argues that the second-level theory offers the best explanation of the explananda (though the race is close), including the important but neglected phenomenon of “intermediate determinables.” Secondly, by paying attention to intermediate determinables and instantiation of higher-order properties, the paper claims that the second-level theory is also more ontologically economical. For these two reasons, this theory is preferable.

There is no reason to replace the Razor with the Laser

In recent times it has become common to encounter philosophers who recommend the replacement of one principle concerning theory choice, Ockham’s Razor, with another: the Laser. Whilst the Razor tells us not to multiply entities beyond necessity, the Laser tells us only to avoid multiplying fundamental entities beyond necessity. There appear to be seven arguments in the literature for the Laser. They divide into three categories: arguments from the nature of non-fundamentality attempt to motivate the Laser by appeal to various observations about what it is to be non-fundamental; arguments from cases describe hypothetical or actual cases, and allege that only the Laser accords with our intuitive judgements about them; and arguments from analogy claim that ontological parsimony is analogous to conceptual economy, and that this analogy recommends the Laser. I provide novel responses to each of the extant arguments for the Laser, and conclude that there is currently no good reason for replacing the Razor with the Laser.

Platonism and Mathematical Explanations

Ontological parsimony requires that if we can dispense with A when best explaining B, or when deducing a nominalistically statable conclusion B from nominalistically statable premises, we must indeed dispense with A. When A is a mathematical theory and it has been established that its conservativeness undermines the platonistic force of mathematical derivations (Field), or that a non numerical formulation of some explanans may be obtained so that the platonistic force of the best numerical-based account of the explanandum is also undermined (Rizza), the parsimony principle has been respected. Since derivations resorting to conservative mathematics and proofs involved in non numerical best explanations also require abstract objects, concepts, and principles under the usual reading of “abstract,” one might complain that such accounts turn out to be as metaphysically loaded as their platonistic counterparts. One might then urge that ontological parsimony is also required of these nominalistic accounts. It might, however, prove more fruitful to leave this particular worry to the side, to free oneself, as it were, from parsimony thus construed and to look at other important aspects of the defeating or undermining strategies that have been lavished on the disposal of platonism. Two aspects are worthy of our attention: epistemic cost and debunking claims. Our knowledge that applied mathematics is conservative is established at a cost, and so is our knowledge that nominalistic proofs play a genuine theoretical role in best explanations. I will suggest that the knowledge one must acquire to show that nominalistic deductions and explanations do indeed play their respective theoretical role involves some question-begging assumptions regarding the nature and validity of proofs. As for debunking, even if the face value content of either non numerical claims, or conservative mathematical claims, or platonistic mathematical claims didn’t figure in our causal explanation of why we hold the mathematical beliefs that we do, construed or understood as beliefs about such contents, or as beliefs held in either of these three ways, we could still be justified in holding them, so that the distinction between nominalistic deductions or non numerical explanations on the one hand and platonistic ones on the other turns out to be spurious with respect to the relevant propositional attitude, i.e., with respect to belief.

Objects and Events: an Investigation into their Identification

John goes out for a walk. If John endures and his walk perdures, they are different entities. However, what if both John and his walk perdure? Is John’s walk identical to his relevant temporal part? Some philosophers answer in the affirmative. Their motivations rest on ontological parsimony and the quest for clear-cut identity criteria for existing things. By contrast, one of the most widely accepted theories of events – the theory of events as property-exemplifications – allows us to formulate an argument to the effect that objects’ temporal parts are distinct from the events they participate in: the AID argument, as I shall call it. In this paper, I argue that accepting austere nominalism is the best strategy a supporter of the identification between events and temporal parts of objects can take in order to resist the AID argument.

Platonism And Mathematical Explanations

Ontological parsimony requires that if we can dispense with A when best explaining B, or when deducing a nominalistically statable conclusion B from nominalistically statable premises, we must indeed dispense with A. When A is a mathematical theory and it has been established that its conservativeness undermines the platonistic force of mathematical derivations (Field), or that a nonnumerical formulation of some explanans may be obtained so that the platonistic force of the best numerical-based account of the explanandum is also undermined (Rizza), the parsimony principle has been respected.Since both derivations resorting to conservative mathematics and nonnumerical best explanations also require abstract objects, concepts and principles, ontological parsimony must also be required of nominalistic accounts. One then might of course complain that such accounts turn out to be as metaphysically loaded as their platonistic counterparts. However, it might prove more fruitful to leave this particular worry to one side, to free oneself, as it were, from parsimony thus construed and to look at other important aspects of the defeating or undermining strategies that have been lavished on the disposal of platonism.Two aspects are worthy of our attention: epistemic cost and debunking arguments. Our knowledge that good mathematics is conservative is established at a cost, and so is our knowledge that nominalistic proofs play a theoretical role in best explanations. I will suggest that the knowledge one must acquire to show that nominalistic deductions and explanations do play their respective theoretical role involves some question-begging assumptions regarding the nature of proofs. As for debunking, even if the face value content of either conservative or platonistic mathematical claims didn’t figure in our explanation of why we hold the mathematical beliefs that we do, we could still be justified in holding them so that the distinction between nominalistic deductions and explanations and platonistic ones turns out to be invidious with respect to the relevant propositional attitude, i.e., with respect to belief.

Trading Ontology for Ideology (and Vice Versa)

In this paper, I defend modal dimensionalism against the objection that it is ontologically and ideologically heavy. First, I briefly outline the theory and the objection against it. The objection relies on the widely accepted view that ontological and ideological parsimony are operational criteria when comparing metaphysical theories. Second, I outline the conventional distinction between ontology and ideology in the metaphysical tradition. Third, I challenge a particular kind of parsimony: reduction by identification. Fourth, even if reduction by identification is accepted, I show that theories that pursue this often minimize differences, and that such minimization paves the way to epistemic underdetermination. Finally, I demonstrate that some theories in modal metaphysics also suffer from difference minimization and should thus not be measured on the ontology/ideology scale (contra the objection from heaviness).

Why Ockham’s Razor should be preferred to the Laser

Ockham’s Razor advises us to not multiply entities (or kinds of entities) without necessity. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer and Karen Bennett have argued that we ought to replace Ockham’s Razor with the Laser, the principle that only advises us to not multiply fundamental entities (or kinds of fundamental entities) without necessity. In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s Razor is preferable to the Laser. I begin by contending that the arguments offered for the Laser by Schaffer and Bennett are unpersuasive. Then I offer two cases of theory assessment that I believe the Razor handles better than the Laser. Finally, I argue that accepting the Laser gives rise to a difficult explanatory challenge: It is difficult to explain why fundamental entities and non-fundamental entities ought to be treated differently in ontological parsimony assessments. A recurring secondary theme of the paper is that the most tempting ways of responding to my arguments frequently result in the Laser losing much of its significance for debates about ontology. Thus, not only is it difficult to defend a preference for the Laser over the Razor, but it is especially difficult to do so while maintaining the Laser’s dialectical significance.

Against Conjunctive Properties

I put in question in this article the existence of conjunctive properties. In the second section, after having provided a characterization of conjunctive properties, I develop an argument based on the principle of ontological parsimony: if we accept that there are conjunctive properties in the universe then, ceteris paribus, our ontology turns out to be less ontologically parsimonious than if we reject them. Afterwards, in the third section, I distinguish between maximalist and non-maximalist and reductionist and non-reductionist theories of conjunctive properties, as well as between reductionist and non-reductionist theories that reject conjunctive properties. Such distinctions help to clarify the options at hand when accepting or rejecting conjunctive properties. In light of these distinctions, I then tackle two objections against the argument from ontological parsimony. Finally, in the remaining sections, I deal with two arguments defended by D. M. Armstrong for the existence of conjunctive properties: the argument from infinite complexity and the argument from causal powers. I show that there are several ways to resist these arguments and their conclusion.

Radical embodied cognitive science and problems of intentionality

Radical embodied cognitive science (REC) tries to understand as much cognition as it can without positing contentful mental entities. Thus, in one prominent formulation, REC claims that content is involved neither in visual perception nor in any more elementary form of cognition. Arguments for REC tend to rely heavily on considerations of ontological parsimony, with authors frequently pointing to the difficulty of explaining content in naturalistically acceptable terms. However, many classic concerns about the difficulty of naturalizing content likewise threaten the credentials of intentionality, which even advocates of REC take to be a fundamental feature of cognition. In particular, concerns about the explanatory role of content and about indeterminacy can be run on accounts of intentionality as well. Issues about explanation can be avoided, intriguingly if uncomfortably, by dramatically reconceptualizing or even renouncing the idea that intentionality can explain. As for indeterminacy, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin point the way toward a response, appropriating an idea from Ruth Millikan. I take it a step further, arguing that attention to the ways that beliefs’ effects on behavior are modulated by background beliefs can help illuminate the facts that underlie their intentionality and content.

Analysis, Explication, and the Nature of Concepts

What does the way we clarify and revise concepts reveal about the nature of concepts? This paper investigates the ontological commitments of conceptual analysis and explication regarding their supposed subject matter – concepts. It demonstrates the benefits of a cognitivist account of concepts, according to which they are not items on which the subject operates cognitively, but rather ways in which the subject operates. The proposed view helps to handle alternating references to ‘concepts’ and ‘terms’ in instructions on analysis and explication. Furthermore, its virtue lies not in the capacity to render concepts ‘shareable’ but in its ontological parsimony.

Mereological Nihilism: Keeping It Simple

(Mereological) nihilism states that there are no composite objects—there are only sub-atomic particles such as quarks. Nihilism’s biggest rival, (mereological) universalism, posits vast numbers of composite objects in addition to the sub-atomic particles, and so nihilism appears to be the more ontologically parsimonious of the two theories. If this is the case, it’s a significant result for the nihilist: ontological parsimony is almost always thought to be a theoretical virtue, so a nihilist victory in the parsimony stakes gives us a defeasible reason to be nihilists. But things aren’t so straightforward. Karen Bennett (2009) has argued that nihilism is no more quantitatively parsimonious than universalism. Furthermore, her argument can be redirected so that it threatens the nihilist’s perceived advantage over universalism in the qualitative parsimony stakes too. I here argue that these arguments are flawed and that nihilism is indeed more quantitatively and qualitatively parsimonious than universalism.

Ontological Parsimony, Erosion, and Conservatism

AbstractThis article presents a novel argument against a common principle of parsimony in philosophy. First, it identifies a widely employed principle of positive ontological parsimony, according to which we should, ceteris paribus, prefer smaller ontologies to larger ontologies. Next, it shows how this principle is used as part of a strategy by which to argue for antirealist positions in many subfields of philosophy: the ockhamistic antirealist strategy. Third, it argues that this principle commits its adherents to an implausible epistemological thesis—the Eroding Ontology Thesis—according to which evidence for the existence of some entity is at least prima facie evidence against the existence of all other entities. Antirealists might decide to adopt a related position, ontological conservatism, according to which we should simply resist changing our ontology, but the article shows that it is independently unjustified. Therefore, it concludes, philosophers have good reason to cease employing one very common antirealist strategy.

Nonparametric Estimation for Self-Exciting Point Processes—A Parsimonious Approach

There is ample evidence that in applications of self-exciting point-process models, the intensity of background events is often far from constant. If a constant background is imposed that assumption can reduce significantly the quality of statistical analysis, in problems as diverse as modeling the after-shocks of earthquakes and the study of ultra-high frequency financial data. Parametric models can be used to alleviate this problem, but they run the risk of distorting inference by misspecifying the nature of the background intensity function. On the other hand, a purely nonparametric approach to analysis leads to problems of identifiability; when a nonparametric approach is taken, not every aspect of the model can be identified from data recorded along a single observed sample path. In this article, we suggest overcoming this difficulty by using an approach based on the principle of parsimony, or Occam’s razor. In particular, we suggest taking the point-process intensity to be either a constant or to have maximum differential entropy, in cases where there is not sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that the background intensity function is more complex than those models. This approach is seldom, if ever, used for nonparametric function estimation in other settings, not least because in those cases more data are typically available. However, our “ontological parsimony” argument is appropriate in the context of self-exciting point-process models. Supplementary materials are available online.

Laws Are Not Descriptions

The view that takes laws of nature to be essentially nothing more than descriptions of facts is still rather popular. The present article, on the contrary, defends the claim that the only real motivation for defending a descriptive view of laws—the quest for ontological parsimony—entails too high a price to pay in philosophical terms. It is argued that nomic primitivism, namely the alternative option that takes laws to be primitive fundamental entities in our ontology, is decisively more appealing, since it is the crucial role assigned to laws that makes a scientific theory of natural phenomena a system rather than a list. Finally, the implications that nomic primitivism might have for the issue of the status of the wave function in that particular formulation of quantum mechanics known as Bohmian mechanics are considered.