What Is Conservatism?

One day, some years ago, Daniel Z. Korman looked out the window and saw a dog and a tree. He drew the following, apparently reasonable conclusions: there is a dog out there; there is a tree out there; there is a trunk of the tree out there, which partly composes the tree; and there is nothing out there which is composed of the trunk and the dog. Are these reasonable conclusions true? The view Korman calls conservatism says yes: there are trees, trunks, and dogs, but no trogs, where a trog is an object composed of a trunk and a dog. Conservatism is not exhausted by appeal to these particular kinds of things. The general view concerns which highly visible (2), material (25) objects there are. According to the conservative, there are ordinary objects, like dogs, trunks, tables, cars, and the like; but no extraordinary objects, like trogs, incars, or snowdiscalls (23). Korman is a conservative, and offers both arguments in favor of conservatism and responses to arguments against it. The range of non-conservative views is, of course, vast: for every putatively extraordinary object kind, there is a nonconservative view which says there are objects of that kind. Similarly, for every putatively ordinary object kind, there is a non-conservative view which denies 1More exactly, ‘conservatism’ is short for ‘ontological conservatism’: clearly, it should not be confused with any political view. 2An incar is an object whose existence and material extent depend on the spatial relations between a car and its surroundings. An incar comes into existence when any part of a car comes to be spatially contained in a garage, and is composed of just those material bits of the car that are inside the garage. If there are any incars and you drive your car into a garage, an incar begins to exist when the tip of the bumper first enters the garage, and grows as the car moves in. It sticks around just so long as the car remains in the garage. If you subsequently drive the car out of the garage, as it leaves, the spatial and material extent of the incar shrinks, and the incar goes out of existence when the last bit of the car exits the garage. 3A snowdiscall is a lump of snow that essentially has some shape between a ball and a disc. You might scoop up a lump of snow and create a snowdiscall by packing it into a ball. If you subsequently pack it into a brick shape, you destroy the snowdiscall even though the lump of snow has survived (17).