DigitalUM :: Browsing by Subject "Elegancia"

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Elegance and Parsimony in First-Order Necessitism
(Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, 2026) Conde, Violeta; Sin departamento asociado
In his book Modal Logic as Meta-physics, Timothy Williamson defends first-order necessitism using simplicity as a powerful argu-ment. However, simplicity is decomposed into two different, even antagonistic, sides: elegance and parsimony. On the one hand, elegance is the property of theories possessing few and simple principles that allow them to deploy all their theo-retical power; on the other hand, parsimony is the property of theories having the fair and necessary number of ontological entities that allow such theories give an account of themselves. Since necessitism endorses Barcan Formulae for the sake of elegance, it is committed to a vast number of contingently non-concrete objects, so one may think that it is not qualitatively parsimonious. I argue that necessitism could be viewed as an additive case in the sense that Alan Baker characterizes the adjective, so quantitative parsimony should be considered when it comes to necessitism instead of qualitative parsimony.