Abstract
Ockham’s Razor advises us to not multiply entities (or kinds of entities) without necessity. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer and Karen Bennett have argued that we ought to replace Ockham’s Razor with the Laser, the principle that only advises us to not multiply fundamental entities (or kinds of fundamental entities) without necessity. In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s Razor is preferable to the Laser. I begin by contending that the arguments offered for the Laser by Schaffer and Bennett are unpersuasive. Then I offer two cases of theory assessment that I believe the Razor handles better than the Laser. Finally, I argue that accepting the Laser gives rise to a difficult explanatory challenge: It is difficult to explain why fundamental entities and non-fundamental entities ought to be treated differently in ontological parsimony assessments. A recurring secondary theme of the paper is that the most tempting ways of responding to my arguments frequently result in the Laser losing much of its significance for debates about ontology. Thus, not only is it difficult to defend a preference for the Laser over the Razor, but it is especially difficult to do so while maintaining the Laser’s dialectical significance.
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Notes
I’ll use ‘entity’ in this paper to refer to items of any ontological category.
Note that this is a citation of people who have noted ontological parsimony as a potential motivation for a sparse ontology, not a citation of people who accept a sparse ontology.
Bennett actually accepts a more nuanced principle, which she calls the Taser, to handle the possibility that there is no fundamental level. However, the differences between the Laser and the Taser won’t make a difference to my arguments. So, I’ll ignore this complication in what follows.
See also Baron and Tallant (2018) for a similar response.
At least if we assume that we are talking about grounding explanations rather than causal explanations.
Baron and Tallant deny that Schaffer’s case supports the Conceptual Laser and then give an argument against the Conceptual Laser (2018, pp. 600–601). I accept the Conceptual Laser but deny that one can argue by analogy to the (ontological) Laser. I believe that the case they provide that is supposed to show that the Conceptual Laser doesn’t work fails to take into consideration other theoretical virtues. And I give some positive reasons in the next paragraph for accepting the Conceptual Laser.
For more on structure, see Sider (2011).
There is good reason to accept this connection. If you deny it, then in addition to explaining the already puzzling claim that the world is more likely to be simple, you must also provide independent justification for the claim that a conceptually simpler theory is more likely to be true. You must explain this in light of the fact that conceptual simplicity has no connection to how simple the world is.
Note that Schaffer’s principle does, in fact, advise us to add useless concepts. Otherwise, the qualification would read “only useful ones” rather than “especially useful ones.” If he were to change the qualification to “only useful ones,” then the principle wouldn’t conflict with either the conceptual or ontological Razor. Even proponents of the Razor can agree that we should add concepts or entities to our theories if they are useful. Then there would be no violation of the “without necessity” proviso.
Baron and Tallant (2018) also present two counterexamples against the Laser. Let me explain why I find their counterexamples unpersuasive. Their first case is the reluctance that scientists once felt in positing tectonic plates in order to explain observed patterns of similarity and difference in biological life across different regions. Scientists (at one point) wanted to explain these facts solely by appeal to evolutionary mechanisms and occasional improbable dispersals. They were resistant to posit a new kind of entity, namely, a tectonic plate, in order to explain these patterns. Baron and Tallant note that tectonic plates are not fundamental. Thus, the scientists’ hesitancy reveals, according to Baron and Tallant, that they were relying on the Razor, not the Laser. However, I believe this counterexample is ably handled by Bennett’s elegance-based response (discussed in more detail below). Plate tectonic theory isn’t really ontologically less parsimonious. Everyone already believed in the existence of chunks of ground beneath their feet, after all. Rather, the complexity of plate tectonics consists in that it introduces more complicated explanations as well as new ways in which the things we already believed in (i.e., chunks of earth) behave. Their second case involves a case where a scientist, Avogadro, chose one theory over the other because the former posited fewer atoms than the other. Since atoms are not fundamental, Baron and Tallant claim this shows that Avogadro was relying on the Razor, not the Laser. However, this counterexample can be easily handled by noting that positing more atoms involves positing more fundamental entities (i.e., the fundamental entities that make up the additional atoms), even if atoms themselves are not fundamental. So, the Razor and the Laser deliver the same verdict in this case. Baron and Tallant’s response to this reply is to note that Avogadro did not in fact rely on the Laser since he did not appeal to any differences in the fundamentals in making his decision. So, scientific practice fits better with the Razor. However, what seems important to me is that scientific practice could have relied on the Laser rather than the Razor in this case and the results would be the same. Scientific practice only gives us a reason to think the Razor is superior to the Laser if the results of relying on the former rather than the latter would have been better in some way. The Avogadro case does not provide evidence of this.
This is obviously very similar to the doubled mereology case that Schaffer considers (2015, p. 656). It is constructed, however, to avoid the reply that the doubled theory involves a more complicated axiomatization.
This would require allowing that a single property can realize numerically distinct properties, but this seems plausible. A particular physical property may realize the property of being in pain as well as the property being conscious, for example.
For a nice explanation of the subset view of property realization, see Wilson (2011).
Note that it is not a problem for my argument that such a theory might nevertheless be metaphysically impossible. All that I need is that one can make legitimate judgments about the ontological parsimony of the theory, and one can make such judgments about metaphysically impossible theories. For example, it is plausible that either presentism or eternalism is metaphysically impossible. However, we can still judge whether one is more parsimonious than the other.
Note that there are other cases that don’t involve mental properties that would do just as well for my purposes. For example, consider a simple material constitution view that holds that there is a single statue constituted by a single lump of clay. Now compare that with a doubled material constitution view according to which there are two qualitatively identical statues constituted by the very same lump of clay (where the two statues have all the same non-haecceitistic properties, including modal properties). Once again, it seems these two theories are empirically equivalent. Moreover, the doubled version seems less plausible. While some may be tempted to posit multiple statues (or statue-like objects) corresponding to every possible modal profile (Bennett 2004), few would want to countenance multiple statues with all the same modal profiles. I suggest the best explanation of the implausibility of the doubled material constitution view is that it is less ontologically parsimonious. And the dialectic will unfold in a very similar way as it did with the doubled mental property example.
Lowe does describe the four categories of his ontology as ‘fundamental.’ However, this is because Lowe is using the term in a very different way than proponents of the Laser (2006, p. 8).
However, see McDaniel (2017) for a defense of such a view.
It’s important to note that fundamental and derivative entities are typically independently adjustable in the sense that the derivative entity could exist without the fundamental entities that ground it and vice versa. For example, barring mereological essentialism, it’s plausible to think that the parts of an organism can exist without the organism and that the organism can exist without its (current) parts.
It is important to note that the claim is not that it is difficult for the mereological universalist to explain these congruence facts. They can explain these facts quite easily. The point is that, unlike the nihilist, they do have explain these congruence facts.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Karen Bennett, Augie Faller, Arc Kocurek, Sharon Lampman, Taylor-Grey Miller, Nico Silins, and an audience at the 2019 UT Austin Graduate Conference for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Da Vee, D. Why Ockham’s Razor should be preferred to the Laser. Philos Stud 177, 3679–3694 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01388-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01388-9