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    Possibilism inflates ontology with entities that bear no ... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Possibilism can account for the truth of claims about merely possible individuals such as a possible child of Portman and Bush.

    Possibilism inflates ontology with entities that bear no causal or epistemic relations to us, violating the methodological principle that ontological commitment requires empirical or rational grounding.

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    Key Terms

    Epistemic relations(epistemology)
    Relations including deductive and inductive implication between cognitive states
    Inflate ontology(as a criticism suggesting possibilism makes our theories too crowded with entities)
    To add too many things to the list of what we believe is real, making our theory unnecessarily complicated.
    Methodological principle(as a standard of good philosophical practice)
    A basic rule or guideline that philosophers follow when doing philosophy, about how they should approach problems.
    Ontology(Carnap argues this enterprise is based on a mistake)
    The philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is.
    Rational grounding(as another way to justify why we should believe something is real)

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    Support for a belief based on logic, reasoning, or arguments that make sense, regardless of what we can observe.
    causal relations(Davidson's distinction between causal and logical relations)
    Relations that obtain between events themselves, independent of how those events are described
    empirical grounding(as what the objection claims would undermine a priori justification)
    Basing a belief or claim on observations, experiences, or information gathered from the real world through our senses.
    ontological commitment(Used to derive that literal truth of 'a is F' entails existence of a)
    The criterion by which acceptance of a sentence as literally true commits one to the existence of the objects referred to by singular terms in that sentence, provided the sentence cannot be paraphrased away.
    possibilism(Contrasted with actualism; evaluates obligations based on what the agent could do, not what the agent will do.)
    The view that an agent's obligations are determined by the best act-set possible for the agent across the relevant time span, regardless of what the agent will actually do.

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    2 topics

    Modality & Possibility1 linkedPhilosophy of Language1 linked

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    Possibilism can account for the truth of claims about merely possible individual...

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