On Quantitative and Qualitative Parsimony

The distinction between quantitative and qualitative parsimony is supposed to allow David Lewis to dismiss one of the charges against his modal realism: that is, the charge of bloated ontology. The aim of this paper is to undermine Lewis's response to this objection. In order to do this, a distinction between multipliable and nonmultipliable objects is introduced. Based on this it is argued that the acceptance of Lewis's response requires one to believe in modal realism in the first place—that is, one has to believe in the view that the existence of nonactual spatiotemporal worlds does not affect the quality of the ontological commitment. Although the paper focuses on the problem of the metaphysics of possible worlds, this should be regarded merely as a case study. Accordingly, the results of this analysis should find applications in other metaphysical debates as well.     

Psychology of Science/Theology of Science: Reaching Out or Narrowing?

Formalizing a “psychology of science” today will constrain intellectual freedom in ways more likely stultifying than liberating. We should be more improvisational in seeking ideas from academic psychology to develop a more comprehensive purview. I suggest that a psychology of science should look at systematic theology and empirical theology. Liberal theologians have long experience trying to distill from religion those structural aspects that affirm openness in a search for truth. Science, as well as religion, has its myths and rituals, but theologians are more experienced than scientists at a large mythohistorical scale. There are distortions in the extreme degree to which psychological science has traditionally emphasized empiricism, positivism, hypothesis testing, and falsifiability. I argue for less critical reduction and more creative augmentation. This could include looking outside academia at cognitive competencies of people in trades. Exaggerated parsimony is an old story. This is illustrated by the opposition to David Hartley's 1749 theory of neural oscillations. There is an inexorable “margin of uncertainty” where scientific prediction and control can never outstrip the new uses to which human beings put ideas. Facts and values interact in this margin; theology has long made a home there, but scientists sometimes have been excessive in rejecting the “naturalistic fallacy.” There is also often a degree of disingenuousness in psychology's reluctance to take subjective phenomena seriously; here there may be lessons in how empirical theology has handled subjectivity, as well as in taking an honest look at the way much of the methodology of experimental psychology incorporates subjective assessments. Feist's book is a start, but these things need more thought before codifying a psychology of science.     

THE epistemologies of parsimony: A review of Ockham's razors: A user's manual by Elliott Sober

Sober analyzes two paradigms of parsimony that have been used successfully in science. These are associated with two interpretations of probability: Bayesian and frequentist. Sober applies these paradigms to problems in biology, psychology, and philosophy. In the chapter on psychology, he argues that objective data consisting of environmental input and two or more concurrent responses could be used to refute empirically the radical behaviorist thesis that probability of learned responses can be accounted for solely on the basis of environmental variables. Sober believes that such data are readily available and offers a thought experiment to illustrate his point. Behavior analysts, however, would want actual experimental data, undoubtedly with animals, before accepting any such refutation. Nonetheless, Sober's philosophical point about the type of experiment that would be capable of refuting this thesis is valid. The behavior analytic program, however, does not depend upon the truth of this thesis.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
John Lachs, In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate To Die
Lou Marinoff, Plato not Prozac: Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems
Victoria Davion and Clark Wolf (eds), The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls     

Quine’s Eliminativism and the Crystal Spheres

Quine’s eliminativist theory has largely been ignored by the philosophical community. This is highly regrettable because Quine’s theory is probably close to correct. Now, the probable correctness of Quine’s theory has an important consequence since, according to the theory, there are no mental entities (events, states, phenomena, properties, etc.) nor do such entities play any role in a scientific account of the relevant phenomena. But the hundreds or probably thousands of publications that deal with issues such as mental causation, the nature of qualia, supervenience of the mental, or multiple realizability, presume the existence of, or at least attribute a positive role to, mental entities. The probable correctness of Quine’s theory therefore suggests that all these publications are worthless and reading them is a waste of time just as reading studies about how crystal spheres can move planets is considered nowadays a waste of time.

Tolerance in a rigorous science

Scientists often evaluate other people's theories by the same standards they apply to their own work; it is as though scientists may believe that these criteria are independent of their own personal priorities and standards. As a result of this probably implicit belief, they sometimes may make less useful judgments than they otherwise might if they were able and willing to evaluate a specific theory at least partly in terms of the standards appropriate to that theory. Journal editors can play an especially constructive role in managing this diversity of standards and opinion.     

Retributivism and Multiple Offending

This article addresses the question of how multiple offenders – that is, offenders who have committed more than one crime before they are apprehended – should be punished from a retributivist point of view. Two theories are evaluated, both defending the view that there should be a bulk discount for multiple offending. According to the first theory, a bulk discount follows from the idea of a punishment ceiling for types of crimes and the principle of parsimony in punishing. According to the second, the discount follows from a certain view on mercy. However, it is argued that both theories suffer from theoretical flaws and that they are also insufficient in practical terms. That is, they fail to provide a basis for the making of decisions about how multiple-offence cases should be dealt with by the criminal justice system.     

The cost of truthmaker maximalism

According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer. However, it will be argued here that these theories cannot be sustained, and hence maximalism comes with a serious ontological cost. Neither Armstrong's invocation of totality facts nor the Martin-Kukso line on absences can meet this cost satisfactorily. I'll claim that negative facts are the best (and perhaps only) way out of the problem for the truthmaker maximalist.     

What’s Wrong With Infinite Regresses?

It is almost universally believed that some infinite regresses are vicious, and also almost universally believed that some are benign. In this paper I argue that regresses can be vicious for several different sorts of reasons. Furthermore, I claim that some intuitively vicious regresses do not suffer from any of the particular aetiologies that guarantee viciousness to regresses, but are nevertheless so on the basis of considerations of parsimony. The difference between some apparently benign and some apparently vicious regresses, then, turns out to be a matter of a more general assessment of costs and benefits, making viciousness of regresses in some cases less of a local matter than is usually thought.     

The simplicity of theories: Its degree and form

Almost all commentators acknowledge that among the grounds on which scientists perform theory-choices are criteria of simplicity. In general, simplicity is regarded either as only a logico-empirical quality of a theory, diagnostic of the theory's future predictive success, or as a purely aesthetic or otherwise extra-empirical property of it. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the simplicity-criteria applied in scientific practice include both a logicoempirical and a quasi-aesthetic criterion: to conflate these in an account of scientists' theory-choice is to court confusion.