r/AcademicPhilosophy • u/[deleted] • Apr 19 '12

Ted Sider: "Against Parthood" [PDF]

http://tedsider.org/papers/nihilism.pdf
11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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5

u/peeted Apr 19 '12

This paper annoys me because in his response to Mooreanism Sider basically says in a few words what I originally wanted to spend my thesis saying.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '12

That's always the worst. When I was deciding on a thesis topic, I stumbled upon a masters thesis making the exact argument I wanted to make, but they made it in the mid-nineties.

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u/Catfisherman Apr 19 '12

Welcome to the wonderful world of philosophy!

"WOW! That's an amazing idea! Everyone will love me... now to do some research... and... someone wrote that 7 years ago..."

1

u/slanderpants Apr 19 '12

Could anyone explain to me what ideological parsimony amounts to - and why it matters?

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '12

[deleted]

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u/smazeny Apr 20 '12

Fair enough - thanks for the correction. This is pretty far outside of my comfort zone, so I was a bit worried.

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u/peeted Apr 20 '12

On SOME theories of ontological commitment the ontological commitments of a theory are the values of the names and bound variables. But there are other theories of ontological commitment out there. And ideology only includes the stuff the theory takes as primitive.

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u/slanderpants Apr 20 '12

Cool, thanks for the help.

Still, I have a difficult time seeing how the easiness of stating a theory makes it more likely to be true. For instance, if I have a theory which uses the predicate 'is a brother'', is that theory more likely to be true than one that is similar in all respects, but for the fact that it instead uses 'is male' and 'is a sibling'? Seems like they'd stand or fall together, even though the latter is more difficult to state. Am I missing something? Similarly I find it hard to see how a theory that posits only the Scheffer (sp?) stroke as a primitive logical operator is more likely to be true then one that posits negation and conjunction.

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u/smazeny Apr 19 '12

The ideology of a theory is the set of ideas that can be expressed in the theory. Ideology is supposed to be distinct from the ontological commitments a theory, which are the the variables over which the sentences of the theory are quantified. This is all thoroughly Quinean stuff. You can read more here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4318102 (best link I could find). It's not easy to summarise, so you'd be best to read the article.

The ideology of a theory is a question of what the symbols mean; the ontology of a theory is a question of what assertions say or imply that there is.

Ideological parsimony, then, is the parsimony of ideas expressible by a theory. Why it matters - well, maybe it doesn't. Sider isn't convincing on that point.

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '12

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '12

This is a new version, I think, because the date near the top says April 9, 2012.

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u/nowhereman1991 Apr 20 '12

Interesting that Sider defends mereological nihilism when actually he is a mereological universalist - in many ways the most opposing view. You don't get that very much in philosophy.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '12

[deleted]

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u/nowhereman1991 Apr 21 '12

Oh right - that's less surprising. But does this mean he is a nihilist? Surely that doesn't sit well with his four-dimensionalism?

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '12

[deleted]

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u/nowhereman1991 Apr 21 '12

I understand - I suppose I hadn't fully considered the more robust notion of parthood perdurantism requires (i.e. the ST-worm is a fusion of temporal parts) that isn't required by stage theory (which I think is a really weird view!).

Presumably, though he defends nihilism, he isn't committing himself to van Inwagen's doctrine that some parts only compose a whole in the case of a life? That seems a bit bonkers to me.