Download Issues in Theoretical Diversity: Persistence, Composition, by Kristie Lyn Miller PDF

By Kristie Lyn Miller

Our international is stuffed with composite items that persist via time: canine, folks, chairs and rocks. yet in advantage of what do a host of little items get to compose a few higher item, and the way does that larger item persist via time? This publication goals to reply to those questions, however it does so by way of debts of composition and endurance via a brand new methodological lens. It thereby bargains a totally novel view approximately patience and composition.

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Extra resources for Issues in Theoretical Diversity: Persistence, Composition, and Time

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So whatever one’s take on the simplicity issue, it is difficult to see how considerations of simplicity will be of help in determining whether or not theories are correctly translatable. There is, however, a way in which we can rule out some practical translations as being correct. In the previous section I spoke of ‘substantive’ explanatory differences between theories. I use this term to distinguish the normal sorts of cases of differential explanatory power, from cases where we conclude that two theories differ insofar as one theory has additional explanatorily redundant elements such as the addition of necessary truths.

First, consider how we are to ascertain whether the positing of the relevant unobservable facts is principled or ad hoc. Suppose I am considering three- and four-dimensionalism. Suppose everyone agrees that the What is Metaphysical Equivalence? 23 theories are empirically equivalent. Is there some unobservable fact in virtue of which one theory is true and the other false? Well, if four-dimensionalism is true, then it might be because objects are composed of temporal parts. That fact is unobservable, but clearly positing temporal parts it is not ad hoc, it is precisely part of the apparatus of the theory.

Thus whenever Statue exists, Statue is coincident with Clay, though there are times when Clay exists and is not coincident with Statue: they are temporarily coincident. In general, any two persisting objects O and O* are temporarily coincident just if there is some time t at which O and O* materially coincide, and some time t* at which at least one of O or O* exist, such that O and O* do not materially coincide at t*. When Clay and Statue coincide their relation is a close one: they share the same intrinsic properties, and indeed, are indiscernible.

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