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DavesNotHere's avatar

I’m way out of my depth here. What would it mean for abstract objects to be real or unreal? Is unreal the same as imaginary?

If something is real, we can make propositions describing it, and be correct or incorrect. We can apply categories and logic to it.

But we can be correct or incorrect about imaginary things, too. “Harry Potter has a scar on his forehead” is true, but it isn’t about a real person, it is about a character from fiction. “Socrates had a big nose” could be cashed out in observations about a historical figure, while the description of Harry Potter gets cashed out by reading Rowling's canonical fiction. Harry Potter the person isn’t real, but Harry Potter the fictional character is real. Santa Claus is not a historical figure, but a cultural ... construction? Product? Entity? A character from a story?

What follows from assuming x is real, or x is unreal? What sort of evidence will give us clues?

Physical objects seem real because we can manipulate them. Johnson refutes Berkeley by kicking a rock.

A few things seem true because their logical negations lead to contradictions. Are they real because we can’t manipulate them?

Is an accusation of unreality just a disguise for questions about the referents of propositions, like “the present king of France is bald?” No such person exists, he isn’t real, so the statement is not a proposition.

Is the English language real? I don’t really know what that means.

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astew's avatar

Re: Nominalism vs Realism

Is there a prima facie reason to exclude the possibility that concrete things do not exist, but abstract things do? Every time we look closely at something that appears to be concrete, it always seems to turn out to be an abstraction -- an illusion created by a confluence of events happening at a much smaller scale.

Even when you get down to atoms and quantum fields, all we can really talk about is the statistical patterns we observe when we arrange events in certain ways.

Is it inconceivable that it's abstractions all the way down? Need there be a concrete base layer?

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