How not to defend ontological cheats

Abstract

Many metaphysicians are attracted to a thought I shall call the ‘grounding principle’: roughly speaking, that for every true proposition, there must be an object that grounds it, that makes it true. They sometimes advocate this principle as a way of ‘catching ontological cheats’: theorists or theories endorsing claims without endorsing the ontology required by the truth of these claims. Jonathan Tallant (2009) tries to show that being a cheat (in the eyes of said metaphysicians) is not so bad: some theories – his examples are versions of actualism and presentism – violating the grounding principle offer significant advantages compared with their ‘grounded’ competitors. He tries to show this by (among other things) arguing for the following theses: OP: Rejecting the grounding principle in favour of a weaker alternative allows us to account for the truth of modal and past-tensed claims in a more ontologically parsimonious way, namely without postulating modal or temporal ontology (i.e. non-actual objects and worlds, and non-present objects and times). (cf. 2–3) TV: The ontological parsimony gained by those theories violating the grounding principle is not counter-balanced by the comparative simplicity and elegance of their competitors, since the latter kind of simplicity is not a genuine theoretical virtue, whereas ontological parsimony is. (cf. 6–7)

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