Against Parsimony

Martin Vacek (Slovak Academy of Sciences)

The Slovak-Austrian Philosophy of Language Network (https://danzeman.weebly.com/slovak-austrian-cooperation.html) announces an online talk by Martin Vacek (Slovak Academy of Sciences), entitled "Against Parsimony". The talk is on Friday, MAY 28, 13.15 CEST, and is hosted by the Vienna Language and Mind seminar, University of Vienna. Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to participate.

Here is the abstract of the talk:

It is almost a platitude to claim that there are disagreements between metaphysical theories since (analytic) metaphysics is about arguments and counterexamples. Next, such disagreements occur primarily at the level of their metaphysical commitments and concern the so-called metaphysical parsimony. Finally, metaphysical parsimony as a theoretical virtue values the minimizing of theoretical commitments which come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. I argue that the distinction between ontology and ideology is too coarse-grained and the “counting” is not an exclusive guide to the truth. To motivate a finer-grained analysis I will formulate additional methodological principles against metaphysical parsimony.