To Be Announced

Jason Turner (University of Arizona)

Abstract:

Here’s a common situation: There are two metaphysical views --- call them BIG and SMALL --- where everything posited by SMALL is posited by BIG, but not vice versa. (Consider: Platonists vs. Nominalists; compositional nihlists vs. non-nihilists; eternalists vs. presentists.) Sometimes, BIG will argue against SMALL by way of an Expressive Power Argument: An argument that there are features of the world we find it useful to communicate about, and that our communications are prima facie incompatible with SMALL. The complaint is that SMALL is unable to explain this communicative usefulness and is thus insufficient. The argument is often also paired with a demand that SMALL account for usefulness by way of a paraphrase. In this paper I examine these arguments, with especial focus on a recent expressive power for Necessitism --- the view that necessarily, everything is necessarily something --- against it’s SMALLer opponent, Contingentism. I argue that we ought to relax the demand for paraphrase, replacing it with a weaker demand of entailment by conservative extensibility. This provides a sensible route for contingentist resistance to the expressive power argument while placing important restrictions on which distinctions the contingentist can recognize as useful. I finish by considering two different expressive power arguments, this time both against presentism, and concluding that, by the lights of the weakened requirement, one of them fails and the other succeeds.