In terms of Lewis, I don’t know of someone criticising him for this off-hand but it’s worth noting that Lewis himself (in his book On the Plurality of Worlds) recognises the parsimony objection and feels the need to defend himself against it. In other words, even those who introduce unparsimonious theories in philosophy are expected to at least defend the fact that they do so (of course, many people may fail to meet these standards but the expectation is there and theories regularly get dismissed and ignored if they don’t give a good accounting of why we should accept their unparsimonious nature).
Sensations and brain processes: one of Jack Smart’s main grounds for accepting the identity theory of mind is based around considerations of parsimony
Quine’s paper On What There Is is basically an attack on views that hold that we need to accept the existence of things like pegasus (because otherwise what are we talking about when we say “Pegasus doesn’t exist”). Perhaps a ridiculous debate but it’s worth noting that one of Quine’s main motivations is that this view is extremely unparsimonious.
From memory, some proponents of EDT support this theory because they think that we can achieve the same results as CDT (which they think is right) in a more parsimonious way by doing so (no link for that however as that’s just vague recollection).
I’m not actually a metaphysician so I can’t give an entire roll call of examples but I’d say that the parsimony objection is the most common one I hear when I talk to metaphysicians.
In terms of Lewis, I don’t know of someone criticising him for this off-hand but it’s worth noting that Lewis himself (in his book On the Plurality of Worlds) recognises the parsimony objection and feels the need to defend himself against it. In other words, even those who introduce unparsimonious theories in philosophy are expected to at least defend the fact that they do so (of course, many people may fail to meet these standards but the expectation is there and theories regularly get dismissed and ignored if they don’t give a good accounting of why we should accept their unparsimonious nature).
Sensations and brain processes: one of Jack Smart’s main grounds for accepting the identity theory of mind is based around considerations of parsimony
Quine’s paper On What There Is is basically an attack on views that hold that we need to accept the existence of things like pegasus (because otherwise what are we talking about when we say “Pegasus doesn’t exist”). Perhaps a ridiculous debate but it’s worth noting that one of Quine’s main motivations is that this view is extremely unparsimonious.
From memory, some proponents of EDT support this theory because they think that we can achieve the same results as CDT (which they think is right) in a more parsimonious way by doing so (no link for that however as that’s just vague recollection).
I’m not actually a metaphysician so I can’t give an entire roll call of examples but I’d say that the parsimony objection is the most common one I hear when I talk to metaphysicians.