The Ontogeny of Quine’s Ontology

Quine’s philosophical views did not emerge fully formed in the 1930s; rather, they changed over the seven decades he was philosophically active. This chapter investigates two episodes in Quine’s ontological development: his engagement with Pythagoreanism (an Appendix with new primary sources is included), and his conversion from nominalism to Platonism about mathematics. These two topics might seem completely distinct. However, although they could conceivably be treated separately, this chapter treats them together by considering the role clarity plays in both these episodes. Quine’s changing views about the theoretical virtue of clarity, and which particular things are clear and which are not, help explain his ontological development. In particular, the chapter offers a new hypothesis about the causes of Quine’s conversion from nominalism to realism, in which his views about clarity play an essential role.

Theoretical Virtues in Science

A theoretical virtue in science is a property of a scientific theory that is considered desirable. Standard theoretical virtues include testability, empirical accuracy, simplicity, unification, consistency, coherence, and fertility. First highlighted by Thomas S. Kuhn in a seminal paper in 1977, theoretical virtues have come to play an important role in a number of philosophical debates. A central bone of contention in many of these debates is whether theoretical virtues are epistemic, i.e., whether they are indicative of a theory’s correctness, or whether they are just pragmatic, concerning only the convenient use of a theory. Particularly contested virtues are simplicity and unifying power. In the scientific realism debate, in which philosophers argue about whether or not scientific theories allow us to uncover the reality behind the phenomena, scientific realists have argued that virtuous theories are more likely to be correct than a less virtuous ones, even when they accommodate the same data. In the closely related debate about the so-called Inference to the Best Explanation, realists have argued that not only can we determine the best explanation on the basis of its virtues, but we can also determine which explanation is the true one. In discussions about “theory choice” or “theory appraisal,” philosophers discuss which virtues might be most decisive in scientists’ deliberations about which theory they should adopt. Here a theory’s successful novel predictions, or novel successes for short, have been a particular focus. Philosophers have also discussed possible trade-offs between various virtues and the difficulties which these may pose for theory choice. Samir Okasha has argued recently that there cannot be any rational algorithm for theory choice. Theoretical virtues also play a role in philosophical accounts of the laws of nature. One extremely prominent account, namely David Lewis’ Best System Analysis, appeals to simplicity and unifying power to determine what generalizations qualify as genuine laws of nature (rather than just accidentally true generalizations). Even in philosophical theorizing about science, theoretical virtues have been appealed to: Rudolf Carnap believed that simplicity and fruitfulness were important desiderata guiding the explication of scientific concepts. Finally, psychologists have started to investigate the role of theoretical virtues in picking explanations. There is work that appears to show that children and adults have preferences for simple and broad theories.

Methodological Conservatism and the Epistemic Condition

The claim that agents are morally responsible for actions the wrongness of which they fail to be aware of only if they are responsible for their occurrent ignorance strikes many philosophers as unacceptable, because it is too revisionary: it entails that many of the everyday judgments that we are disposed to make are false. Agents satisfy these conditions too infrequently for our everyday judgments to be vindicated. These philosophers maintain that it is a theoretical virtue to preserve as many of our everyday judgments as possible. This chapter attempts to show that we ought not to strive to preserve as many of our everyday judgments about responsibility as we might think. It offers an error theory for why we are often disposed to judge that individuals are responsible when we are implicitly committed to thinking that they are not.

A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry

The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not require us to take on controversial metaphysical or metaethical commitments – in other words, it has the theoretical virtue of portability.

On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity

One of the most difficult and perplexing tenets of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Broadly put, this is generally understood to be the thesis that God is altogether without any proper parts, composition, or metaphysical complexity whatsoever. For a good deal more than a millennium, veritable armies of philosophical theologians – Jewish, Christian and Islamic – proclaimed the truth and importance of divine simplicity. Yet in our own time, the doctrine has enjoyed no such support. Among many otherwise orthodox theists, those who do not just disregard it completely explicitly deny it. However, in a couple of recent articles, William E. Mann has attempted to expound the idea of divine simplicity anew and to defend it against a number of criticisms. He even has gone so far as to hint at reaffirming its importance, suggesting that the doctrine may have a significant amount of explanatory power and other theoretical virtue as part of an overall account of the nature of God, by either entailing or in other ways providing for much else that traditional theists have wanted to say about God. In this paper, I want to take a close look at Mann's formulation of the doctrine and at a general supporting theory he adumbrates in his attempt to render more plausible, or at least more defensible, various of its elements and implications. As Mann has made what is arguably the best attempt to defend the doctrine in recent years, I think that such an examination is important and will repay our efforts.