Abstract
To start with, we have to attend to the most straightforward and naturally paradigmatic language-game of talking about spatio-temporally locatable and datable individuals. Let us call this game “Game (1)”. to signify its primacy, which, if not ontologically uncontroversial, is at least intuitive. The original psychological roots of reference can surely be traced back to this game. Its bona fide items would be concrete spatio-temporal particulars such as books, flowers, birds, people, motorcars, houses, countries and limbs of living bodies. Material such as mud, water or sugar is also talked about, not merely in the unsorted generic fashion but also riding on count-nouns — “blobs”, “drops”, and “lumps” — bit by bit in the singled-out fashion.
Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.
Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 45
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Notes
There is an interesting debate in Nyâya Vai.tesika philosophy as to whether they are mere lack of light or positive entities. Those who think that they are positive coloured objects appeal to our experience of shadows as moving, remaining static, growing bigger and smaller, trailing behind bodies, being countable and having contours. Even the school which reduces them to mere absences of light, regards them as objective, none the less. See also G.E. Moore “Shadows, Patches of Light, Etc” in Commonplace Book,p. 142. For vague objects, see Terence Parsons, “Entities Without Identity” in Tomberlin, (1987).
See Gale (1966) pp. 99–101 and Geach (1955) p. 267.
If, in a dream, I seem to sit with a friend who has passed away and then mentally exclaim, when half-awake, “But he does not exist!”,the statement will be a negative existential only in form; it will actually be a statement of absence which can only be about real absentees. See Appendix for further distinctions between absence and unreality. This would be the Nyâya position.
Prior talks about this at length in Sec. 12, Ch. VIII of his Past, Present and Future. To quote a typically Prioresque parenthesis, “The dead are metaphysically less frightening than the unborn.”
Quoted in Williams (1981) p. 118.
Superficially like counter-factuals, which, as it were, take some uniformities and essential features of the actual world for granted and diverge from it only at a certain point or at a certain level of contingent characteristics.
Collected Shorter Poems (1927–57) Faber, (1966), p. 320.
The author’s stance inside game (2) is usually that of an all-knowing reporter. But, sometimes, to make the pretence of “recording facts” more vivid — the author too can fear a mistake or confess ignorance.
There is a traditional philosophical usage of the term “imagination” which covers erroneous experience. See Strawson (1974) pp. 45–64, where the following quote from Kant occurs: “It does not follow that every intuitive representation of outer things involves the existence of these things, for their representation can very well be the product merely of the imagination (as in dreams and delusions).”
The “of’ in ”dream-of’ is, again, misleading here; I think it is perfectly normal to say, “I saw an ancient manor house in a dream last night, but that house does not exist.” See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,p. 184 on dream-describing as a language-game.
Usually, it is only for a short while after we wake up that we talk referringly about dream items and then, of course, we can use names for them if names are heard or otherwise psychologically associated with those items inside the dream.
What, in a recently popularised jargon, are called “QUALE” have sometimes been called “phenomenal objects”. But qualia, as far as I can now tell, are not game (3) items. They belong, if anywhere, in game (1). Since I have anti-materialistic sympathies, I would like to believe that qualia are real and hence not native items of game (3). No native of game (3) really exists.
See Bob Hale, Abstract Objects (Blackwall, 1987) for the hierarchy of abstract objects.
Ordinary usage does not seem to be absolutely clear about such questions. Hence the flexibility in our conceptual scheme.
See Sharpe (1979). Perhaps the interpretations are not quite particular entities themselves; they can be looked upon as modes in which performances can exemplify musical works. So we have musical works, under a certain interpretation, where both the work and the interpretation are repeatable but not the performance.
And, one tends to think tensed denials of fictional characters are also possible if we use sentences within game (2) such as, “Sherlock Holmes did not exist in the 16th century”, etc. It would not be possible to talk about dead fictional items unless someone dies in the story (e.g. Hamlet’s father) and is still talked about. If the story ends when the hero is about to die,we still cannot say that he died afterwards. In game (2) he remains timelessly moribund, unless we pretend that we do not have adequate information about when he finally died.
See Routley (1966) pp. 52–53 for the notion of suitable designata and interpretation of “(ix)” in its terms. Also see Redmon (1973) p. 59 for reference to language-games.
One may want to tighten the definition by adding “which satisfies the predicate ’... exists at t’ for some t” (only applicable to game (1)).
These exotic references will be given more substance in the Appendix to this book.
See “Real” and “Imaginary” in his Lectures in Philosophy (1966).
It is this phenomenon which Walton calls “unmasking a pretence from within”. See p. 423 of Mimesis As Make-Believe (1990).
Suppose I walk out of a restaurant, saying to the waiter, ‘Sam Jones will pay the bill’; Sam Jones does not exist; but has one casual remark created a fictional character? This seems extravagant“ Kripke (1973 b, Shearman Lecture 3). Also: ”`Supervisor Josef decided your case. The matter is closed. I can do nothing.’; So I was told by a government clerk wishing to be rid of me. I later discovered that there was no Supervisor Josef. Did the clerk refer to a Supervisor Josef? No: he pretended to“ (Ziff, 1984, p. 31). Note that this sort of deceitful pretending does not count as a move in game (2). The clerk was not engaging in a make-believe situation that he wished us to take part in.
See p. 285 of Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino (1980).
God himself,“ says Thomas Aquinas, ”is neither universal nor particular.“ (Summa Theologica,question 13, article 9).
When in his Psychology (Vol. II, pp. 291–311) James speaks with insight about “the many worlds” to which “every object we think of gets referred”, he mentions the worlds of “illusions and prejudices of the race”. He goes a little too far when he allows the world of sheer madness, although some story worlds come pretty close to craziness in conceptual indiscipline.
See Huizinga’s eye-opening discussion of this point in Chapters VI and II of Homo Ludens,(1955). For many Tibetan Buddhist monks, deciding deep ontological issues about the nature of the self, time, causality, etc. is a very vigorous game practised with the full theatrical flare of the sport of debate — to this day.
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Chakrabarti, A. (1997). The Scaffolding for a Solution. In: Denying Existence. Synthese Library, vol 261. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1223-1_2
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