Trading Ontology for Ideology (and Vice Versa)
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Trading Ontology for Ideology (and Vice Versa) Martin Vacek 1 Received: 19 June 2019 / Accepted: 9 October 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract In this paper, I defend modal dimensionalism against the objection that it is ontologically and ideologically heavy. First, I briefly outline the theory and the objection against it. The objection relies on the widely accepted view that ontological and ideological parsimony are operational criteria when comparing metaphysical theories. Second, I outline the conventional distinction between ontology and ideology in the metaphysical tradition. Third, I challenge a particular kind of parsimony: reduction by identification. Fourth, even if reduction by identification is accepted, I show that theories that pursue this often minimize differences, and that such minimization paves the way to epistemic underdetermination. Finally, I demonstrate that some theories in modal metaphysics also suffer from difference minimization and should thus not be measured on the ontology/ideology scale (contra the objection from heaviness).
1 Modal Dimensionalism and the Heaviness Problem Modal realism (hereafter MR) is realism about possible worlds. Possible worlds, the ways the world could be, exist in the very same way the actual world does. As opposed to, say, Stalnaker’s account (Stalnaker 1976), Lewis’s MR (Lewis 1986a, b) identifies ‘ways things might have been’ with possible worlds’.1 According to MR, possible worlds are concrete, spatiotemporal and causally isolated systems inhabited by concrete, spatiotemporally and causally isolated possibilia. Modal ersatzism (hereafter ME) is a sort of MR to the extent that it holds that possible worlds exist. In addition, however, it holds that they merely represent how concrete reality could be. They are usually considered abstract entities that either do or do not have an internal structure. Modal dimensionalism (hereafter MD) is not MR. MD is not ME either. MD lies somewhere between the two positions.2
1 Stalnaker dubs MR as ‘extreme’ realism about possible worlds since, for him, it is not true that ‘possible worlds are things of the same sort as the actual world-‘I and all my surrounding”. (Stalnaker 1976, 67). 2
For the comparison of MD and MR, see Yagisawa (2010) and Kim (2011).
* Martin Vacek [email protected]
1
Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Klemensova 19, 811 09 Bratislava, Slovakia
M. Vacek
Possible worlds, according to MD, are neither concrete nor abstract and do not provide us with a reduction of modality. They are points in modal space at which the universe is a certain way (cf. Yagisawa 2010, 2). What we can positively say about them, though, is that they are real3 in the same way spatial and temporal indices are real. Another important feature of MD is that it relies on modal tensing. The crux of this feature is that we take spatial and temporal tenses seriously as spatial and temporal modifiers of verbs and introduce their modal analogue—modal tense. Modal tense, spatial tense and temp
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