What's in a name? Qualitativism and parsimony.
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,...
| Publicado en: | Philosophical Studies Vol. 182; no. 5; pp. 1361 - 1382 |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Jun2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | 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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