Talking About Nothing: Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions

Talking About Nothing: Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions
OUP USA (14 Oct 2010) | ISBN: 0199738947 | 288 pages | PDF | 1.6 MB

Ordinary speech and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a peculiar way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to breathe: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized neve>rtheless nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the matter of inquiry of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot withdraw from keep clear of talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to recite things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or wrong), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to have ~ing a flying horse,or "That elf I'm now hallucinating athwart there is wearing blue shoes.Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of uncompounded idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not favorably accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things hind part before the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things finish not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers ofttimes feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that the whole of our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only show . This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in constitutional ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of oratory of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that of the like kind objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and in the way that are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are encircling them.

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