Abstract
In Ontology Made Easy and elsewhere Amie Thomasson has made a proposal about the significance of easy arguments for metaphysics. Easy arguments are apparently trivial inferences from premises that seem philosophically innocent to conclusions that seem to be philosophically substantial. In this paper my focus will be on well-know easy arguments for the existence of numbers, properties, and composite objects. I critically investigate Thomasson’s proposal about how to understand easy arguments and what significance they have. In particular, I will focus on the philosophy of language in the background of these arguments, and raise various problems for Thomasson’s account. I will also discuss her critical take on the proposals that others have made about these arguments, in particular her criticism in Ontology Made Easy of my own proposal.
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Notes
- 1.
I will rely on Thomasson’s presentation of her view in (Thomasson, 2015). There are also numerous later papers by Thomasson discussing objections and clarifying her view, but as far as I can tell the view remains the same.
- 2.
A broadly congenial, but different, line is taken in (Schiffer, 2003).
- 3.
You can find the details in the first half of (Hofweber, 2016).
- 4.
This line differs from Yablo’s more recent position concerning subject matter spelled out in (Yablo, 2014).
- 5.
To be clear, there can be cases where the truth-conditions are affected by a focus construction, namely when it involves focus sensitive expressions, for example ‘only’. ‘Only Mary entered quietly’ and ‘only quietly Mary entered’ can be understood as differing in truth-conditions. And this general phenomenon of focus sensitive expressions can be illustrated with more natural examples, but I won’t pursue this now, since it isn’t relevant for our example in the main text.
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Hofweber, T. (2023). Thomasson on Easy Arguments. In: Garcia-Godinez, M. (eds) Thomasson on Ontology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23672-3_3
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