Overdetermination and the Epistemic Argument

• Autores: Orensanz, Martín
• Año de publicación: 2023
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: OVERDETERMINATION; ORDINARY OBJECTS; ELIMINATIVISM; CAUSALITY
• Institución: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

The overdetermination argument that Merricks advances for the elimination of ordinary objects aims to show that an event, such as the shattering of a window, can never be determined by two independent causes, such as a baseball on the one hand and a collection of atoms arranged baseballwise on the other. And if this is so, then baseballs do not exist. In a previous article, I suggested a novel way to resist that argument. However, Merricks also advances an epistemic argument, which aims to show that we should suspend our belief in the existence of baseballs. I resorted to Korman’s reconstruction of the epistemic argument, in order to deny one of its premises. But my interpretation of the logical structure of the argument was incorrect, since I treated its mere conditionals as if they were biconditionals. Here I would like to correct my mistake, by providing a new refutation of the epistemic argument.
Fil: Orensanz, Martín. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología. Laboratorio de Zoonosis Parasitarias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata; Argentina