What's in a Name? Qualitativism and Parsimony

Philosophical Studies (forthcoming)
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Abstract

According to qualitativism, thisness is not a fundamental feature of reality; facts about particular things are metaphysically second-rate. In this paper, I advance an argument for qualitativism from ideological parsimony. Supposing that reality fundamentally contains an array of propertied things, non-qualitativists employ a distinct name (or constant) for each fundamental thing. I argue that these names encode a type of worldly structure (thisness structure) that offends against parsimony and that qualitativists can eliminate without incurring a comparable parsimony-offense.

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Daniel S. Murphy
Le Moyne College

Citations of this work

Haecceitism and Symmetry-Breaking: Things, Time, and Powers.Daniel S. Murphy - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Writing the Book of the World.Theodore Sider - 2011 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
A World of States of Affairs.D. M. Armstrong - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Guide to Ground.Kit Fine - 2012 - In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder, Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--80.
Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.Gideon Rosen - 2010 - In Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann, Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. qnew York: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-135.
The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science.Theodore Sider - 2020 - Oxford, England and New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.

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