Really? I would have thought imaginary entities don't exist and so don't need to be 'ejected' from the domain of discourse. There are no unicorns or hobbits for me to eject, are there? — Srap Tasmaner

How do we determine what counts as fictional and what does not? Is Allah fictional... Jesus?

What you need is an account of how talking about fiction works. — Srap Tasmaner

Not I. I've given my account: Frodo is a hobbit, therefore the class of hobbits is not empty - they are fictional creatures. It's you who are in need of an account of how we can talk rationally about fictional or imagined characters.

It is an error to confuse existential quantification with being real. But that seems to be what you are doing.

How do we determine what counts as fictional and what does not? Is Allah fictional... Jesus? — Tom Storm

Who knows? There are arguments, there's evidence, and some empirical questions are hard to answer.

I think fiction is a pretty subtle thing, and there are simpler cases to consider. Lots of things used to exist and don't anymore. The class of Tokyo hotels designed by Frank Lloyd Wright used to have one member, the Imperial, but now it's empty. We may have evidence, from Audubon or something, that there was once a bird called the Whiffle-Breasted Woodpecker, now believed extinct; we would say that class used to have members and now it doesn't. But someone may spot one someday, and then it will turn out that class is not empty after all.

Does the Higgs boson exist? We had the class, defined theoretically, for years before we could manage observations that showed that class to have members. The Michelson-Morley experiment was widely taken as showing that the class of luminiferous aether is empty.

...everything perceivable by humans (directly or indirectly) is real. — Daniel

No illusions, hallucinations or delusions, then. But these are usually taken to be exactly cases in which what is perceived is not real. Think I'll leave this to you to fathom.

Who knows? There are arguments, there's evidence, and some empirical questions are hard to answer. — Srap Tasmaner

Sounds like we're fucked then and to a large extent doomed to be the playthings of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Trump. :wink:

It's you who are in need of an account of how we can talk rationally about fictional or imagined characters. — Banno

I'd love to. Fiction is interesting because pretending is really interesting.

No idea why it should change how I think about logic though.

Sounds like we're fucked then and to a large extent doomed to be the playthings of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Trump. — Tom Storm

?

? — Srap Tasmaner

If the real is so elusive, so difficult to establish, then many of us will continue to be seduced by the glib certainties of extremists, carpetbaggers, shills and sophists.

If the real is so elusive, so difficult to establish — Tom Storm

I only said that some empirical questions are hard to answer. It took a long time and a lot of money to observe the Higgs, and for a long time it was a thing we just could not do. Some questions about the past we likely will never be able to answer. The existence of books about a guy from Nazareth named 'Jesus' (or something like that) suggest he was a real person, but it's hard to know for sure for a great number of reasons. We know surprisingly little, as I recall, about the personal life of Shakespeare, but he too was probably a real person.

If you're interested in my opinions, I'll give you one: I find the stories about Bigfoot hoaxes persuasive, the guys that made the footprints for fun, running along behind a pickup, the guy that dressed in the costume for a wannabe filmmaker, plus I'm convinced by the argument that a breeding population of bigfeet would have to be big enough that we're likely to have had incontrovertible proof by now, if they existed. So I think there's no Bigfoot, and I will be very surprised if it turns out there is.

We're in 'prove a negative' territory, but I'm pretty confident the class of bigfeet is empty. That's harder to determine than whether I'm out of Pop Tarts but not as hard to determine as whether there are gravitons.

Frodo is a hobbit, therefore the class of hobbits is not empty - they are fictional creatures. — Banno

Hobbits, then, form a subclass of the class of fictional creatures, right?

So Boromir could well have argued, at the council of Elrond, that Frodo could not possibly carry the One Ring to Mordor because he was a hobbit, and thus fictional. Why do you suppose he didn't? But then, maybe no one at the council knew that hobbits are fictional, perhaps through some mischief of Saruman's. Still, you'd think Gandalf would have known, as much time as he spent with them. (Like curling up with his favorite book, I guess.) Luckily, it all worked out. Being fictional didn't stop Sam and Frodo from carrying out their task, so maybe it's not as strong an argument as it seems.

It seems that if one supposes that to be 'real' is to be a 'member of a non-empty class' then Frodo, being a member of the class "Hobbit", is real. — Banno

That's not a real problem. Hobbits are fictional characters, and in that sense, and only in that sense, they are real. Same with unicorns

But Mordor is also fictional. Hence, only a fictional character could carry the One Ring into Mordor. Boromir may have take this into consideration. Certainly Gandalf, in his wisdom, would know that we can talk rationally about fictional characters.

I'll leave you to sort out with Srap whether Frodo is really real or not. I'll stick to his being fictional.

Of course, on your account, to be 'real' is exactly to be a 'member of a non-empty class'. Since Frodo is not real, he could not be a member of the non-empty class of those who walk into Mordor.

To understand the idea of 'real' you need to understand context. I can imagine a Hobbit called Bonehead, but there is no such fictional hobbit, and hence this hobbit enjoys no fictional reality, but this character could be a real imaginary character just for me and anyone else I care to tell his story to. When you understand that all shared realities are established by convention, then you'll get it.

To understand the idea of 'real' you need to understand context. — Janus

That's pretty much what I have been arguing, except I added Austin's strategy for explicating what was being claimed when something is called "real".

So what is it you think we might disagree about, if anything?

Story Robert Creeley tells — didn't happen to him but another poet, I forget who — that after a reading someone from the audience came up to ask our poet about something he read, "Was that a real poem, or did you make it up yourself?"
— Srap Tasmaner

I like that image. It's both. It lies in the overlap of 2 intersecting Venn circles, the real and the imaginary. — Amity

@Srap Tasmaner et al.
Why the lack of response to this amazing insight? :chin:

I'll go you one better.

Marianne Moore published two versions — I think 'published', maybe she only contemplated doing this — of a poem called 'Poetry'. The short version goes like this:

I too, dislike it.

The longer version, with the indentation butchered by our software:

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry. — poets.org, first published 1919

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

What shall we say about that?

Since Frodo is not real, he could not be a member of the non-empty class of those who walk into Mordor. — Banno

You mean, since Mordor is not a real place, the class of people who've been there is empty.

If the bartender is not real, what is he? . — Banno

He could be a reflection in a window that Jack takes for a bartender.

"Real", as you've used it makes perfect sense in spite of the fact that you don't know how exactly he's not real. The "how" of it is a different issue.

But Austin's insight isn't refuted. Most words have meaning relative to their negations. That wisdom did not originate with Austin.

I'll go you one better. — Srap Tasmaner

That you did :up:
Thanks for the introduction to Marianne Moore. Strange how I'd heard of Emily Dickinson but not MM.

The short version goes like this:

I too, dislike it.

The longer version, with the indentation butchered by our software: — Srap Tasmaner

It seems she is in agreement with people who don't like poetry or a certain kind of poem.
Hooked, we wonder who and why...or at least I do...

MM's poem uses indentations; not always appreciated or understood by others and removed by editors.

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

What shall we say about that? — Srap Tasmaner

Good question. I'd be interested to hear what you and others think.
I don't know that I can say anything without context; related to other lines and the poet's mind.
But as a stand-alone, it has relevance to this thread; the real, the imagined and the overlap.

My mind stops still at:

“literalists of
the imagination” — poets.org, first published 1919

What is that about? I haven't a clue...
Is this a criticism of the 'toads'; the anal-ytical 'autocrats' and 'half poets' who trivialise poetry?
They take words too literally. Too 'base'?
Is MM saying that they should view the imagination as real? To be based on what matters to the poet - a sense of the genuine? MM's poetry joins a rawness of the raw reality with a real sensitivity...
Phenomena are important because they are 'useful'.

Back to the practical. A poetic pragmatism.
A melding of the physical form, mental content and spiritual feel.
From the external to the internal and back again.
Words are important not merely as objects in themselves but are used to show or bring life to things. Musically. Things that matter to us.
The concrete toads v abstract thoughts, imaginary gardens or real beliefs...
All real.

You mean, since Mordor is not a real place, the class of people who've been there is empty. — Srap Tasmaner

While that is true, it's not the point I made. If, as you suppose, Frodo cannot be a member of a class, then we can't say that Frodo is a members of the class of things that walk into Mordor. If one restricts the language of classes and predication to non-fiction then one cannot make claims such as "Frodo was a hobbit who walked in to Mordor".

This provides good reason for rejecting

'real' in this general sense is 'member of a non-empty class'. — Srap Tasmaner

The concern to which this was a posited answer was:

I think we would like to be able to say something like, "If something is a unicorn, then it doesn't exist..." — Srap Tasmaner

Well, it's clear that Frodo is not someone who we might meet at the shops, nor an historical figure, but a fictional character. And that is what one is claiming in saying he doesn't exist. As Janus says,

That's not a real problem. Hobbits are fictional characters, and in that sense, and only in that sense, they are real. — Janus

There are a few ways we can deal with fictional, imaginary, or illusory things besides ejecting them entirely from discussion. Creating the classes " fictional", "imaginary", and "illusory" for one, or fiddling with modal logics, perhaps making Middle Eartha possible world. Or restriction the domain to things that are not fictional, imaginary, or illusory, (such as restricting our domain of discourse to physical things) so long as we then do not pretend that this gives us information about such things.

All of which reinforces rather than undermines the view that what is real is best analysed by setting out it's contrary.

All of which is of course subject to the ambiguities of derangements of epitaphs. So King and Kubrick can play with our expectation to understand what Lloyd is not, as points out. Such forms of language use have their being in contrast to our more common language use. We can suppose real toads in imaginary gardens for , or little men who are not there. But if we are to have imaginary gardens, we probably had best keep our capacity to claim that gardens are at least sometimes in the class of places were plants are grown.

Well, it's clear that Frodo is not someone who we might meet at the shops, nor an historical figure, but a fictional character. And that is what one is claiming in saying he doesn't exist. — Banno

We agree he doesn't exist. But you want to still be able truly to predicate "is a hobbit" of him; I don't.

Honestly, I could meet you halfway, and allow a sentence like "Frodo is a hobbit" to be true under somewhat constrained conditions, and those conditions would involve spelling out some of what's involved in Frodo's hobbithood. But for an apples to apples comparison, "Frodo is a hobbit" cannot be true in the same way that "Seabiscuit was a horse" is true. And I don't mean there are different sorts of truth, but that the presuppositions of those statements are so different that I think the statements themselves don't even have the same logical form. Consider the difference between "It says in the book that Frodo is Bilbo's nephew" and "It says in the book that Seabiscuit beat War Admiral by four lengths": the books here are doing very different things.

Everything we say about Frodo is a sort of shorthand for referring to the literary work of Tolkien, and other work derived from it. (And so far as that goes, I don't in fact have a problem with "Frodo is a hobbit." It says so in the book.) It's what allows that strange slipping in out of the text that people fall into when talking about literature: "But on page 74, Frodo tells Sam that ..." Seabiscuit never did anything on a page. And in an obvious sense neither did Frodo. But page 74 says something about Frodo and Sam, and we treat that in a certain sophisticated way.

What I've been trying to get you to see is the shocking incompatibility between "Frodo is a hobbit" and "Frodo is a fictional character." (If "Frodo is a fictional character" is true, how come no one in the books seems to know that? Why would it change the book into some avant-garde foolery if some character in the book said this true thing?) No entity can be both those things. Nothing can be anything and also be non-existent. Flicka cannot be a horse and a fictional character; neither could Seabiscuit, who settled for just being a horse.

"Frodo is a fictional character" and "Flicka is a fictional character" do not predicate anything of entities named 'Frodo' or 'Flicka'. A first pass at parsing "Flicka is a fictional character" might be: "'Flicka' is the name of a character in a book." But 'is the name of' can't mean what it usually means because Flicka doesn't exist, so that's not right. We might as well say "'Flicka' is the name of a horse in a book by Mary O'Hara." Really? How did a horse manage to live in a book? Whatever Flicka is, and however the name 'Flicka' attaches to that, Flicka is not the sort of entity that in real life has a name in the usual way.

I think it's actually pretty hard to give a good account of how we talk about fiction. Most such talk hangs suspended from a counterfactual conditional like "If the story in Mary O'Hara's book were a true story ..." But that's not all of it, because as I noted, we freely pass back and forth between pretending Flicka exists as described and treating Flicka as a textual artifact — "Remember in Chapter 3 when Flicka was out in the thunderstorm?"

There's some pretty sophisticated stuff going on when we talk about fiction, but it's all obscured by familiarity. I remember reading a story somewhere about some Europeans traveling maybe to Japan, some place in the East with a very different theatrical tradition — I may have the details all wrong — and the point was made that the local audience was absolutely mystified by the idea of actors, people pretending to be the characters in stories and speaking their words. They were used to a sort of elaborated story-telling with music and so on, but basically one guy reciting. Acting was incomprehensible to them at first. This is the kind of sophistication we have with fiction that I think is hard to notice, and why I can't just reel off an account of how we think about and talk about these things.

And fundamentally I think all of this is to one side of issues in logic and ontology.

But if we are to have imaginary gardens, we probably had best keep our capacity to claim that gardens are at least sometimes in the class of places were plants are grown. — Banno

True, though just as material gardens are places where material plants are grown, imaginary gardens are places where imaginary plants are grown.

There's some pretty sophisticated stuff going on when we talk about fiction, but it's all obscured by familiarity. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps any 'sophisticated stuff' is not obscured so much as not being necessary when it comes to talking about fiction. Familiarity with fiction lies in the basic telling, showing, listening and reading of stories. Different cultures will have different ways and experiences depending on what has been open to them. Language and expression will vary according to the message and how best it might be transported or transmitted to others.

There is the universal and the particular.
Highlighting a particular reality at a certain time can have the effect of expanding our knowledge or understanding of the universal. Of what it is to be human...actors alone or together at a stage of life.
Real wrongs or rights shared.
Authors give voice to those who don't have one...yet.

Examples here:

Fiction can shed light on our shared humanity, as long as it’s respectful and honest. Hephzibah Anderson speaks to the celebrated authors who are creating powerful ‘imaginative ventriloquism’.
[...]
O’Brien hopes that there will, among the thousands of women who’ve been captured, be an Electra who eventually tells her own story in her own words. She’s alluding, of course to the Greek mythological heroine, a pointed reference since she drew, in her writing of Girl, on a long admiration of the way that Greek drama combines simplicity with gravity.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200310-how-to-tell-other-peoples-stories

And fundamentally I think all of this is to one side of issues in logic and ontology. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't understand what you mean. Please explain, thanks.

And fundamentally I think all of this is to one side of issues in logic and ontology.
— Srap Tasmaner

I don't understand what you mean. Please explain, thanks. — Amity

I only mean that modern logic of the sort we typically use these days in philosophy is Frege's logic: there are objects — so ontology — and functions, literal functions like you learned about in math class that map objects or sets of objects onto the set {0, 1}, truth-values. That's it.

When we talk about Middle Earth, we're only doing logic very indirectly: we're talking about what Tolkien did and did not put in the books, so there are truth-values to be had here, and there are objects, but the objects are, at bottom, words. Did Pippin accompany Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom? That question is not about any persons or places or travel anyone undertook, not really. It's a question about what sentences are in the book, and what the logical relations among them are, or can be worked out to be. The rules of inference are already a kind of pretend; they work as if they treat of known objects we can quantify over and apply known predicates to, but they are only truth-preserving not truth-engendering. There is no truth to the sentences in fiction, so there is no truth to preserve, but the sentences can still be related to one another logically.

Because fiction seems to be about persons, places, and events, it's in one sense a handy showcase for how logic works, but only if we pretend. If we want to say things that are genuinely true and false about fiction in the same way we say them about objects we do find in the world, then we must do this complicated double analysis, that works out the logical connections among sentences on the pretend level, but in the end only quantifies over the words and sentences that make up this textual artifact.

All the trouble is caused by the theory that nouns typically stand for things or persons. Refer to them. Denote them. Point to them. Correspond to them. What have you.

It's true, or worth assuming. But it has limitations, and also an inherent technical complexity, which is the distinction between use and mention. This is conveniently (and often harmlessly) ignored, even in technical discourse like maths. So maintaining it requires considerable skill, but isn't always necessary for the practical success of the discourse. And in the end the underlying theory (word denotes object) loses plausibility.

Its limitations get exaggerated. E.g. the idea that it can't explain fiction without spoiling it. (Not proven.)

And it gets to seem far-fetched, itself. Poor Quine, after taking such pains to clarify and simplify existence claims, with his famous formula, found that people's natural understanding of "value of a variable" wasn't his. He had meant (by analogy with algebra) the number itself, not a numeral or some expression suitable as a substitute. And his point was that the referent (if any) of "Fido" is the dog so named, whereas people (and at least half of philosophers) think this can't be right: reference, being logical after all, must be from word to other word.

But we shouldn't be surprised. Getting one thing to stand in for another is asking for trouble. Even where we immediately clarify the distinction between the two, we resort to proxies. Perhaps we draw a diagram, with an arrow joining a "Fido"-inscription to a dog-picture. Well, this makes sense. Surely we hadn't wanted to draw an arrow in the air from the token to the slobbering mutt itself?

And hence the descent into "to be is to be the subject of a sentence" etc.

And his point was that the referent (if any) of "Fido" is the dog so named, whereas people (and at least half of philosophers) think this can't be right: reference, being logical after all, must be from word to other word. — bongo fury

Like who?

There is no truth to the sentences in fiction, so there is no truth to preserve, but the sentences can still be related to one another logically. — Srap Tasmaner

I would say that sentences in fiction communicate truths. The story contains answers to anyone asking questions, such as:

Did Pippin accompany Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom? That question is not about any persons or places or travel anyone undertook, not really — Srap Tasmaner

Well, yes it is. It is really about what happens in the story whether it is fictitious or not.

Another kind of truth about reality can be found in the likes of Charles Dickens.
In contrast to a fictional truth, this might be termed a 'genuine' truth. His stories present moral or political truths some readers can relate to. Or others can become more aware of e.g. poverty and social conditions.

If we want to say things that are genuinely true and false about fiction in the same way we say them about objects we do find in the world, then we must do this complicated double analysis, — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure that is necessary.
It reminds me of the poem you posted: 'Poetry' by Marianne Moore.
Switch from 'Poetry' to 'Philosophy'.

The longer version, with the indentation butchered by our software:

Poetry Philosophy

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets philosophers , the result is not poetry, philosophy
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry philosophy in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry. philosophy.
— poets.org, first published 1919

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

What shall we say about that? — Srap Tasmaner

I bolded your question to which I attempted a response. Still waiting for your reply...then again:
'There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle'.

And his point was that the referent (if any) of "Fido" is the dog so named, whereas people (and at least half of philosophers) think this can't be right: reference, being logical after all, must be from word to other word.
— bongo fury

Like who? — Srap Tasmaner

Ok... from word to other word, or to idea or concept. Then who not? You, me and Goodman and Quine, apparently.

Ryle objected somewhere to my dictum that to be is to be the value of a variable, arguing that the values of variables are expressions and hence that my dictum repudiates all things except expressions. Clearly, then, we have to distinguish between values of variables in the real sense and values of variables in the Ryle sense. To confuse these is, again, to confuse use and mention. Professor Marcus is not, so far as I observe, confusing them. — Quine, Reply to Professor Marcus

But @Banno is, so far as I observe, confusing the referent of "Frodo" in the real sense with the referent of "Frodo" in the Ryle sense.

Likewise anyone who says, which happens quite a lot round here, something like "to be is to be the subject of a sentence".

so far as I observe, confusing the referent of "Frodo" in the real sense with the referent of "Frodo" in the Ryle sense. — bongo fury

"Frodo went to Mordor"

"George crossed the Delaware."

Both "Frodo" and "George" are expressions. They're both real in their respective frameworks, Frodo being a real Hobbit in LOTR, as opposed to a bad dream Gandalf had.