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A proposal for a minimalist ontology

  • S.I. : New Metaphysics of Science
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Abstract

This paper seeks to answer the following question: What is a minimal set of entities that form an ontology of the natural world, given our well-established physical theories? The proposal is that the following two axioms are sufficient to obtain such a minimalist ontology: (1) There are distance relations that individuate simple objects, namely matter points. (2) The matter points are permanent, with the distances between them changing. I sketch out how one can obtain our well-established physical theories on the basis of just these two axioms. The argument for minimalism in ontology then is that it yields all the explanations that one can reasonably demand in science and philosophy, while avoiding the drawbacks that come with a richer ontology.

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Notes

  1. Castaneda (1980, p. 106) uses the term “super-Humean world”, meaning a view that does not regard energy (or forces) as something that exists in the world; but there is no rejection of absolute space or natural intrinsic properties considered in Castaneda. I’m grateful to Gordon Belot for suggesting the term “Super-Humeanism” for this view of a relationalism that rejects intrinsic properties of the spatial relata.

  2. See Dürr (2013, in particular ch. 2) for Bohmian mechanics. See Dickson (2000), Allori et al. (2008) and Esfeld et al. (2014, 2017) for the Bohmian particles being characterized by their relative positions only.

  3. For the debate about explanations in Humeanism, see Loewer (2012) and then Lange (2013), Marshall (2015) and Miller (2015).

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Acknowledgements

A first version of this paper was presented at the conference “New trends in the metaphysics of science” in Paris in December 2015. I’m grateful to the participants for their feedback, to Max Kistler for the invitation to submit the paper to this special issue, and to three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The programme set out in this paper is worked out in the book A minimalist ontology of the natural world, co-authored by Michael Esfeld and Dirk-André Deckert, forthcoming with Routledge in autumn 2017. Apart from the many discussions with Dirk-André Deckert, the view expressed in this paper is influenced by the work with my collaborators Mario Hubert, Dustin Lazarovici, Andrea Oldofredi and Antonio Vassallo.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Michael Esfeld

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Esfeld, M. A proposal for a minimalist ontology. Synthese 197, 1889–1905 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1426-8

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