Let us now imagine we come across a community with a very strange metaphysical view. Members of this community think that tables exist, but chairs don’t. Under dialectical duress, the Tablers are very stubborn: “It just strikes us that way,” they say. “Our perceptual systems make it seem that when particles are arranged tablewise, they compose an object, but when particles are arranged chairwaise, they don’t.” When asked for general metaphysical principles to corroborate their beliefs, they demur: why should you expect our views about what exists to be undergirded by general ontological principles? We don’t go in for that kind of theorizing. You are like anti-particularist ethicists who tell us that we are not able to say that an act is bad unless we have a fully general theory about the principles by which badness is determined. — Fairchild & Hawthorne
We can juxtapose two views, that either the dog is an whole regardless of language, or it is a whole in virtue of language. Then we can pretend that the one must be true, at the expense of the other.
Seems like "Some of them" is the easy way out? — Moliere
"Some" in a logical sense, at least. — Moliere
"Ordinary" seems sus — Moliere
Then you have two options: eliminativism or permissivism. — Arcane Sandwich
What about "not-ordinary, and conservative"? — Moliere
If you're asking if there could be a fourth position, "only extraordinary objects, none of the ordinary ones", then I would say two things:
1) Yes, it's logically possible to defend such a view.
2) No one actually defends such a view.
Why not? Because you would be saying that there are fouts, but no dogs or trouts. There are incars, but no cars. There are snowdiscalls, but no snowballs.
It would be the most insane position of all, even crazier than permissivism, and that's saying a lot. — Arcane Sandwich
Then I don't think I'm going down that path — Moliere
It's not that interesting when you figure out the game is "say the weirdest thing you possibly can get away with" — Moliere
a sheep broken in half is a corpse. — Count Timothy von Icarus
even ambiguous — Count Timothy von Icarus
But that is not what the fossil record suggests for man, for just one example. — Count Timothy von Icarus
There have not been "very many species indistinguishable from man" existing throughout the Earth's history. There have been, on contemporary accounts, just the one. And this certainly wouldn't be true for domestic animals either. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Unless you are merely speaking of the transition from wolf to dog, in which case what of it? Yes, domestication is not a binary. Yet the aurochs is extinct, the cow is not. More to the point, a stegosaurus is not a dog, an oak is not a dog, a rock is not a dog. These are quite discrete distinctions between dog and not-dog. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If we cannot find it, shall we conclude that either no dogs ever die, or that none have ever lived? Or perhaps that "life" and "being a dog" are mere cultural or mental constructs, ens rationis and not ens reale? — Count Timothy von Icarus
For example, there are curlterpillars: caterpillar-like objects that begin to exist when a caterpillar rolls up into a ball. There are incars: vehicles that look like ordinary cars, but that can only exist when they're inside a garage. — Arcane Sandwich
Must we pretend? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Your essentialism is showing. — Banno
What counts as a whole depends on what you are doing.
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