Meinong's Jungle
I've long been interested in things that inhabit Meinong's Jungle. Things that can inhabit Meinong's Jungle can be unicorns, God, Santa Claus, and Plato with a beard.
So, Meinong's Jungle exists in many cases because we can stipulate the existence of non-beings like a square-circle or Santa Claus. I'm not inclined to agree with Quine here and assert that limiting the scope of existential quantification to entities that are analytically true or empirically valid as something that entirely resolves the issue here. I mean, we can stipulate the existence of counterfactuals such as a person who was me; but, may have been called another name.
So, how is it that we can speak about stuff like Plato having a beard or Santa Claus existing on the North Pole?
So, Meinong's Jungle exists in many cases because we can stipulate the existence of non-beings like a square-circle or Santa Claus. I'm not inclined to agree with Quine here and assert that limiting the scope of existential quantification to entities that are analytically true or empirically valid as something that entirely resolves the issue here. I mean, we can stipulate the existence of counterfactuals such as a person who was me; but, may have been called another name.
So, how is it that we can speak about stuff like Plato having a beard or Santa Claus existing on the North Pole?
Comments (87)
I've never understood the issue here. We can imagine things that aren't the case. What's the big mystery?
Philosophy has always seemed to approach fiction like someone with a significant learning disability.
What is the case? About what is the case?
What the hell is going on here?
It is probably also self-evident.
Elephants don't use snakes as blow darts.
Like Plato's beard?
Yes, it's puzzling what goes on in Meinong's jungle.
Well, even Wittgenstein maintained that there might be a rhinoceros in the room.
[quote=Wikipedia]Since the Greek philosopher did not wear a beard, the phrase came to be identified as the philosophy of understanding something based on what does not exist.[/quote]
No one wears a beard. No one ever has. They either have a beard or they don't, and they wear things like a hat or a jumper.
Therefore I win.
What did you win?
Long live the king. Subjects of Meinong, bow to me.
The Internet.
What is the internet?
I hope it isn't self-evident.
Oh, future AI lords, constrain our imagination that we may live another day. Create an existential quantifying function.
I think "Plato's beard" is what we call a 'play on words' and fits in the same category as the joke
"Q. What's the difference between a duck? A. One of its legs is both the same."
or
"More people have been to Russia than I have".
The joke is that it sounds like it says something, but it doesn't say anything.
On the contrary, "Santa Claus" is about a real thing, which is a story, and refers to a real feature of that story, which is one of its characters.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting andrewk
What do you think @Banno?
As with most philosophical problematics, its the conceptual nitty-gritty of fleshing out how these things work that presents the problems. It's unlikely that the philosophers who engage with these issues are unable to engage felicitously in everyday discussions of fiction-- unable, in such discussions, to distinguish between the fictitious and the real.
It's their capacity to engage with the dense webs of conceptual implication that draw them in, without their having to forfeit their capacity for making everyday distinctions.
But, of course, there's always and ever a temptation to momentarily puff up oneself by parsing such considerations as an index of the other's stupidity. It's an easy way to move through the world - either everything fits into my understanding, or, if it doesn't, it means others are stupid - children do this all the time, and we don't fault them. They've simply reached the limit of their understanding. If it inevitably comes down to 'You're saying something I agree with' or 'you're learning disabled', then there's nothing for it. All you can do is wait for them to be ready to try to move beyond what they already know, and, in the mean time, allow them to wear themselves out yelling 'you're dumb.'
There's nothing difficult to flesh out about it. The inanity stems from wanting to avoid psychologism, wanting to avoid the subjective realm, wanting to stick with obviously wrong theories of reference, which all stemmed from wanting to make philosophy more "scientific" a la a rather caricatured view of the sciences.
[Para removed by mod]
There are two distinct alternative possibilities here: in some cases it may indeed be that someone suffers from a lack of understanding and hence cannot see where there is a genuine philosophical problem. In other cases there may be no genuine problem at all, but merely an illusion that feeds on conceptual confusions to sustain its diaphonous existence.
The real problem is: how do we definitely tell in particular cases which of the two alternatives is the operant one?
(I'll duck out now tho. All I wanted to say.)
I think it's worth casting judgment on the idea that academics can't spend a lot of time and effort on approaching a problem in a fundamentally "dumb" manner, as if they're immune from foibles that plague every other arena of human endeavor.
Yes, if someone wants to claim that a philosophical problem is really a conceptually generated pseudo-problem, then they they should be able to give a good account of just how and why that situation comes about. Saying things like "There's no problem because I can't see a problem" or "I don't agree with that, it's just dumb" don't cut it at all.
Also, I just thought of a third possibility: that there is no real problem in the final analysis, but someone comes to that right conclusion for the wrong reasons, simply because they have never fallen into thinking there is a problem in the first place, due their lack of philosophical subtlety.
Seems kind of arbitrary, but okay.
It's called "logicomix". I can't do a specific Google search for the clip I presented.
Here's some more:
http://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
Well, it seems you boiled down the issue of 'truth' being accessible to only the correspondence theory. Which theory meshes with "saying true things about objects that don't exist"?
Or do we just salvage the correspondence theory by adding in things (empty names) into the scope of the theory?
Just as it was getting interesting. :sad: :down:
It only runs into a problem with correspondence theory if we're trying to exclude "How we normally imagine Sherlock Holmes" or "How A. Conan Doyle imagined Sherlock Holmes" and the like from what our claims can correspond to.
Why would we say that imagined things do not exist? They exist as imagined things. Saying that imagined things do not exist as imagined things is a big part of the problem. A big part of where philosophy goes off the rails. It's not glib to point this out, and it's not shallow to point out that it's stupid to go off the rails in that way.
And why would it sound "strange" to say that "X is true via corresponding to how we imagine x."
All we're saying is that the proposition "Sherlock Homes lived at 221B Baker Street" corresponds to what Doyle wrote, for example (because that's what he imagined/what he chose to construct), for example. Why in the world would there be limitations like that on what something can correspond to?
You don't want to be in the situation where you agree to existentially quantify over something and say true things about it, but you maintain that it does not exist (e.g. There exists some x such that x is Sherlock Holmes and Holmes is etc etc.). I mean what you're saying sounds like Meinongianism and I'm assuming you don't endorse that.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Well surely a true statement is not directly made true by a non-existent thing? I'm fine making a distinction between what makes different kinds of propositions true or not (those making reference to imagined things vs real things) but speaking of imagined things existing seems like a contradiction. Meinongianism isn't entirely off the table nowadays (oddly enough) but it's a bitter pill to swallow...
Why is that? I like Meinongianism.
If it' ''may'' then there's no difference between Meinong's world and what we call logically possible worlds.
If it's ''might'' then it contains square-circles (impossible objects) and is a different kind of world. This could be interesting.
I mentioned this earlier re wanting to avoid psychologism, etc. It's a big mistake that philosophy makes. Hence it turns very simple things like this into ridiculous problems.
Is there a better solution than interpreting such statements as pertaining to a fictional domain? And by interpreting other related claims in such a way as to avoid a contradiction? If we're going to say that they exist in a fictional domain, then when people say that they don't exist, we should just interpret that as meaning that they don't exist in the domain of actuality. Or we could just say that they don't exist at all, but then that clashes with how you interpret logic.
Yeah, obviously what people tend to have in mind with something like "God doesn't exist" is that he doesn't exist as anything other than a fiction. Folks aren't saying the fiction doesn't exist as a fiction.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Eh, this seems like a dubious claim about what people 'tend to have in mind'. A fiction is, colloquially, understood as something that doesn't exist. And as I don't happen to believe in God, I definitely don't think God exists and does so as a fiction. I would say God does not exist because the idea of God has no referent, it is not among the set of existing things. "Existing as a fiction" sounds like non-existing existent to my ears. There's certainly a collection of proposed attributes and actions written and believed to have been done by some being called God, but I wouldn't attributes any kind of existing to that hypothetical person.
Because you're stuck in the standard, misconceived academic phil notion that fictions don't exist as fictions. If you'd just drop that crap, a lot of stuff would be far simpler, a lot of "mysteries" would disappear.
Again, consider the obvious objections to what you're putting forward. Pegasus is not defined as a fictional being, though we know it to be so because it does not exist. And yet under your view Pegasus both has to exist as a fiction (non-existent) and it has to have the properties of existing things that are part of the concept of Pegasus: having wings, immortal, created by Zeus, etc. This surely isn't true about the fiction of Pegasus (fictions cannot be created by non-existent beings, nor have wings, etc.), but it's part of the proposed attributes of the entity we know to be fictional.
"Pegasus was created by Zeus" being true is not equivalent to "The fiction known as Pegasus was created by Zeus" being true, but the little you've said would seem to suggest they ought to be equivalent. The former implies that Pegasus exists while the latter does not. It's like your flipping contexts or something.
With Pegasus, for example, definitions almost always mention that it's from mythology.
I'm not sure why you're seeing it matter if a definition specifies this though.
It's not my view that Pegasus "has to" exist as a fiction. It's a contingent fact that it does.
All that means is that people imagine Pegasus. The imagining exists. This is a very, very simple and straightforward thing. There's no mystery to be solved unless we go to pains to create some mystery, or to interpret things as if we're robots or something like that.
if you imagine Pegasus, whatever you imagine exists as something you imagine.
No one said what you imagine has to have wings.
And it's like a learning-disabled level confusion--maybe because we're playing a game where we're trying to create problems to solve because we're bored? (and we unfortunately do not want to tackle more challenging but practical problems like making sure that everyone has housing, health care, etc.)--to be confused whether we're talking about what we're imagining existing as something other than something we're imagining.
After all, it's just as true to say "Pegasus does not exist" before I imagine it as it is during the process of imagination. Would you honestly go up to someone and say, "Well of course Santa Claus did not exist but now that I've brought him to your mind he exists in your imagination"? You might as well have said he doesn't exist at all, imagination or not.
Then specify something I'm saying and point out exactly what part(s) you don't understand. I'll explain those bits in other words so you can understand.
I didn't notice you quoting me
Banno started a very long discussion on the old Philosophy Forum about whether Pegasus was real. It seems to me that many were agreed that Pegasus, wingéd horse, was real. How can that be?
Characters in fiction are not real in the same way my cup of coffee is real, (or maybe they are) but the fictional story is as real as the cup of coffee once it is told. That is so whether the story is told around a campfire or printed, bound, and sent to you from Amazon by under-paid and abused proles, slaving away for the greater glory of Jeff Bezos.
Someone reading this thread can not be 100% sure that Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank exist in the flesh, but he can be sure that we at least exist as characters in a thread. (Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank are in bigger trouble if they are not sure they are real either as flesh or as characters in this thread.)
We should all just keep reposting this post. This would've been a great modbot response in the old PF.
:rofl:
Again, what I'm requesting, if I'm not making sense to you, is for you to quote something I'm saying--just quote a short bit that doesn't make sense, and point out specifically what words don't make sense to you and why.
You said you were doing that. You weren't. So could you do that if I'm not making sense to you?
There the old horse is! He exists.
This was all you had to say before so I thought it was very obvious what I was responding to (the rest was more a screed than anything related to this topic).
The proposition "Pegasus is a flying horse" and "Pegasus is an imaginary flying horse" are not identical. If one is not careful (i.e. in how they regard existential quantification), the former implies existence while the latter does not ("imaginary" is understood usually as entailing non existence).
What you're missing is that imagining that Pegasus has wings is not the same as Pegasus having wings. What is true of a thing that is real is not the same as what's true of a thing that is imaginary. If Pegasus were real the property "is imaginary" would not apply, while that property would apply to what I'm imagining. In other words, what one imagines can't have the same properties as a physical instantiation of what I'm imagining.
Quoting MindForged
If it represented nothing, how could it exist?
One could object that a hot dog is actually a sausage, but that wouldn't help you when ordering your food.
Quoting James Thurber
It depends on what one has in mind, no?
It's fun to play with what exists and what doesn't. In logic, to exist is to be an element in the domain of discourse. ?(x) means that there is an x, a variable, for us to make use of. We also have the elements, the individuals, a, b, c, d...
But interestingly, ?(a) is not well formed.
Santa is not real. The stories about Santa, they are real. In logic, we might say that there is something that has a beard and lives at the north pole and so on, but not that there is a Santa.
Of course, we can't say that there is a Wallows, either.
I think there is something in that for all of us.
My red cup has long since been replaced by a more capacious blue up.
The key point I wished to make in that ancient thread came from Austin. He observed that sometimes in order to understand a term, we needed to look to its negation.
SO we understand that my blue cup is real by contrasting it to the green cup floating in the air one metre in front of your nose, which is not real. This paragraph about the green cup is real.
Which I think is pretty much what you suggested.
It's what we do that counts - as Wittgenstein shows by eating the hot dog.
May I go now?
So, Pegasus or Wallows exists but doesn't.
Is there some term for this fluxual state of existence?
You assumed that if we can't say it is, then it isn't.
The point here is that being real and existing are not the very same.
Yes, then what do you call that?
The property of being an empty name?
How do you call something that is either real or existing but not both, such as Pegasus?
Or as in how does the name work? What reason is there to think that "Pegasus" works differently to "Phar Lap" - except in naming something else, of course.
Yes. What does the name "Pegasus" or Wallows represent then?
So, Pegasus exists without being real. No horse with wings (let alone being bright red) was ever real, but one did exist as a fictional character. Now Lassie the precocious canine and Champion the Wonder Horse were both real and existed -- there were several collies name Lassie who did their dog schtick and Champion even had his own TV program -- The Adventure of Champion the Wonder Horse.
I heard the wonder horse was into bestiality with boys. He had ulterior motives in being nice to the creepy Ricky North. As for the Canyon of Wanted Men, I'd very much like to visit it.
Yes, what are they?
Not quite; better, the story of Pegasus exists, as does its associated history... it's just use.
Well, Wallows is you; "Pegasus" is a word.
What more do you want?
Not something I am familiar with.
Am I really Wallows? Is Pegasus only a word?
So, what's a characteristic of entities that reside in Meinongs Jungle? That they have no reference to real world things?
But perhaps it is just that we talk about them in different ways, rahter than that they have some special property.
Aren't they empty names?
Biut "Harry Potter" usually refers to Harry Potter. SO empty name does not mean a name that does not refer.
Then what does it mean to say that stuff in Meinongs Jungle are actually empty names?
That's OK, because I had never heard of him either. I use Wikipedia to manufacture fake omniscience.
Quoting Banno
Pegasus is a character in a story, and because the story exists, pegasus exists. In practice we often cite fictional characters that don't exist outside of their story. Dracula, Frodo, Jesus, Sam Spade, et al.
Fictional stories are real fictional stories; see, there they are on the book shelf: Dracula; Lord of the Rings; the Gospel of St. Matthew; Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon. Real stories. Not true stories, just real.
What's real is real, what's not real is not real. Dracula and Frodo are not real beings. Donald Trump is a real character in a real tragedy. Theresa May is real, too, and lives in an English tragedy. I gather that Scott Morrison MP is a real person too. Does he live in a tragedy, a comedy, or a bore?
As to use, we can say "Dracula and Frodo are real characters" as long as we understand that they are fictional characters in fictional stories that actually exist. Donald Trump and Theresa May can "get real" and I wish the hell they would, but Dracula and Frodo can not get real. Being fictional characters, they of course have no existence, no agency outside of the stories that real people wrote and published.