TITLE: Against Conservative Ontology

ABSTRACT: In his recent book Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary (2015), Dan Z. Korman argues in favour of conservatism in metaphysics, that is, very roughly, that what we ordinarily take there to be is true. Especially, we are right about how many objects there are and what these objects are supposed to be. Korman takes conservatism to be opposed both to permissivism, according to which there is much more than we ordinarily take there to be, and eliminativism, according to which, there is nothing of (or much less than) we ordinarily take there to be. Korman’s master conservative defence relies on what he calls the “arguments from counterexamples” plus an epistemic “theory of apprehension”. In this talk, I’ll show that his defensive line is ineffective and that permissivism – at least the version of it I favour – can be vindicated.