Against Conservatism in Metaphysics

Abstract

In his recent book, Daniel Korman contrasts ontological conservatives with permissivists and eliminativists about ontology. Roughly speaking, conservatives admit the existence of ‘ordinary objects' like trees, dogs, and snowballs, but deny the existence of ‘extraordinary objects', like composites of trees and dogs (‘trogs'). Eliminativists, on the other hand, deny many or all ordinary objects, while permissivists accept both ordinary and extraordinary objects. Our aim in this paper is to outline some of our reasons for being drawn to permissivism, as well as some of our misgivings about conservative metaphysics. In the first section, we discuss a tempting epistemic line of argument against conservatism. This isn’t a line of argument we find especially promising. Our most basic complaint against conservatism is not that conservatism has poor epistemic standing even if true, but instead that conservatism is weird. We develop this thought in the second part of the paper. In the final section we discuss some larger methodological issues about the project of ontology.

Arbitrariness and the long road to permissivism

“…In part, this is because shoring up already suspect ontological beliefs by positing a plenitude of objects does nothing to improve the epistemic standing of the beliefs. In Fairchild and Hawthorne (2018), we reply at length on behalf of permissivism. The upshot of our discussion is that, like Korman, we are not optimistic about this line of argument (though for somewhat different reasons).…”

Mooreanism in metaphysics from Mooreanism in physics

“…See footnote 22 above. For a discussion of how some sort of Mooreanism might actually favor of universalism over conservatism, see Fairchild and Hawthorne 2018. ordinary composite objects do in fact exist-and principled-in the sense that it provides some explanation for why some composite objects exist and some do not. Are there viable ways of constructing a principled conservativist theory of composition?…”

Plenitude and necessarily unmanifested dispositions

“…The principle of plenitude has recently been argued to provide a solution to the groundingproblem for coincident objects (see Jago, 2016) and to solve modal puzzles stemming from the thesis of flexible material origins for artefacts (see Leslie, 2011). Furthermore, if the principle of plenitude holds, then ordinary objects exist and have the modal profiles we take them to have without there being any metaphysical arbitrariness concerning which objects there are (see Fairchild & Hawthorne, 2018). It surely is a controversial metaphysical hypothesis, but its growing popularity and its relevance to a diverse range of topics in metaphysics make exploring its consequences a worthwhile task.…”