Think of Hemingway’s story in six words: “Baby shoes for sale. What Webster’s does not mention is the aesthetic aspect of parsimony, although it is conspicuous both in art and science. It is the ‘explanatory’ meaning that is of primary interest to philosophers, although the line between it and means-end “principles of least effort” as Nicholas Rescher calls them, is rather fuzzy and neither sense is far removed from thriftiness with a dollar (pound, euro, renminbi). 2) Economy in the use of means to an end economy of explanation in conformity with Occam’s razor. Webster’s Ninth gives this definition of ‘parsimony’:ġ) The quality of being careful with money or resources the quality or state of being niggardly: stinginess. Ultimately, I suggest that metaphysicians should treat the minimization of the number of ideological expressions as more important than it currently is treated.SUBSCRIBE NOW Metaphysics Parsimony (In as few words as possible) Toni Vogel Carey wonders whether nature loves simplicity. I end by evaluating three different responses to this puzzle. The two activities target the same aspect of reality, the world’s metaphysical structure. I suggest that minimizing the number of ontological kinds just is a specific way of minimizing the number of ideological expressions employed in stating a theory. But, plausibly, the tension runs deeper than that. At the very least, minimizing the number of ontological kinds posited entails minimizing the number of expressions employed-more specifically, the “ontologically committing” predicates. I argue that the two claims are in tension with one other. the compositional predicates “is a part of” and “overlaps”). Second, it is not the case that we ought to minimize the number of ideological expressions we employ, especially when those expressions are of the same ideological kind (e.g. First, we as metaphysicians ought to minimize the number of ontological kinds we posit. This instability is rooted in an unrecognized tension between two claims. In this paper, I argue for the instability of an increasingly popular position about how metaphysicians ought to regard parsimony. Keywords: Leibniz, indiscernibility, identity, thisness, individuation. Finally, if it is said that the (putatively) two objects in BTE cannot be separately individuated, then BTE is not a counter-example to LIdI, because if there is no individuation, there are no individuals either, while LIdI presupposes that there are individuals. Secondly, if the duality claim is based on a primitive, irreducible relation of distinctness, the Leibnizian objection is that there are no irreducible relations. ![]() ![]() ![]() If the claim that there are two objects in BTE is based on primitive thisnesses, the Leibnizian objection is that there are no such things and even if there were, then, quite generally, something true of one object – that it has its primitive thisness – would not be true of the other. ![]() It is argued that from a genuine Leibnizian point of view the well-known thought experiment, call it BTE, involving a possible world with only two exactly similar objects, cannot be used to refute Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (LIdI).
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