Santa Claus doesn't exist as a physical reality. Santa, and dragons and unicorns exist as ideas. In the same way there are physical apples but to define what an apple is gets tricky as this is a concept. Apple-ness. Some are green, some are red, some are sweet, some are sour. Yes they are fruit but so are pears who are closely related genetically. These are two different ways of existing.
No, this is actually reproducing the error Maudlin is attacking. "Santa Claus" and the "idea of Santa Claus" cannot share the property of existence. When Maudlin says, "Language doesn't work that way," that's what he's referring to. The question hinges on "what is the phrase Santa Claus referring to" (the referent). The referent "exists" in the sense that one simply assumes that Santa Claus "points to" or "refers" to something. Duns Scotus noted a long time ago that the first property assumed by people and language is "existence" ... meaning that if you say a word, like unicorn or god, then one tacitly assumes that whatever the word evokes has existence. This becomes the basis for the ontological proof of god (flawed), and Maudlin is, again, attacking it and Parmenides. And probably Duns Scotus. But Duns Scotus is right that any word we say is assumed to LEGITIMATELY be referring TO something. In your example, you are saying that the "idea of Santa Claus" exists. This is, of course, a tautology. The "idea" of "idea" and "Santa" and "Claus" and "of" also "exist". And so it goes.
"It's a virtue of my theory that it doesn't make any sense" is also what Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. "Saint Paul" said when his stories were questioned by reasonable people. Rather than admitting defeat, he never gave up and instead came up with even more fallacies, like the "foolishness of God". And the masses just fell for it.
But of course humanity should believe you, right? The irony of people like you is that you demand that everyone except what you say even when the arguments you use to discredit others also apply to yourself. It's a complete lack of self-awareness that is the defining trait of the pseudo-intellectual.
This is a fair representation of the original argument I think. 1. If Santa Claus (the one and only person) doesn't exist, then the words would refer to nothing, making the words devoid of meaning. 2. If the words have no meaning then Santa Claus (the one and only person) doesn't exist. 3. But you do refer to Santa Claus (the one and only person) therefore the words do have a meaning 4. If and since the words do have a meaning they must refer to something that exists 5. Therefore Santa Claus (the one and only person) exists Let's see if the logic is really as good as it seems. The problem is that you can put anything here. Zeus , Thor, unicorn, the duodadokokolos. This argument’s issue has an ambiguity problem and this argument seems to be begging the question aswell as in it assumes in the conclusion that something referred to must exist, and bases it on a similar premise in different words namely that if we refer to something it must have a meaning otherwise it can't exist. Leaving no true proof. Let's see if it holds up. If a child says to you (meaning to fool you) , “mommy? see that lamp there?” And points behind you in a closed small white empty room. You won't see a lamp. This shows we can refer to things that do not exist. Sure lamps exist. As a concept and as physical objects. But that specific lamp didn't physically exist. So what did he point to that exists? A conceptual projection of the imagination. 1. IF we refer to something THEN it must exist 2. We refer to the flying spaghetti monster 3. Therefore the flying spaghetti monster must exist. 1. solitary person c never sees the woman upstairs anymore (the woman is person b their man is person a) 2. Person c think that person b was murdered by person a. He refers too a friend, about the supposed murder. 3. solitary person c referred to the supposed murder, therefore person a’s supposed murder on person b exists (as in took place) 4. When a murder happens death penalty follows 5. Since the supposed murder exists (took place by proof of 3.) person a will get the death penalty (So the murder does exist in some form sure, but as what? Are you a writer?, are you imagining? is that truly enough reasonable evidence?) This further shows the logic’s issues and they are not small. I would not want to live in that person's country if he made laws based on that logic, I would definitely not want to live above him with a woman that divorced me. Another option: imagine a time before any pyramid was built. And a person has an idea on how to build one. 1. IF we refer to something, THEN it must exist. 2. I the inventor of the pyramid (the concept) refer to the pyramid (the concept) to the king in order to build it. 3. Therefore the pyramid (the concept) does exist So far so good the pyramid as a concept does exist in this case. But here is where the equivocation fallacy would cause issues.. remember this is before the time any pyramid was built on earth. This is about our own planet and its things in existence. 1. IF we refer to something, THEN it must exist 2. I the inventor of the pyramid (the concept) refer to the pyramid (the concept) to the king in order to build it. 3. Therefore the pyramid (the building) does exist See? The logic is the same. It if is referred to it must exist the logic states. Sure. But in what form does the "it"exist? In this case the pyramid (the building does not exist at that time yet seems to be referred to not really though) Exercise: look in the corner of your room or wherever you can find a corner in your vicinity right now.. can you see the ten eyed spider, the size of an airplane? No? Well it MUST EXIST tbat specific one that in that exact spot. Because that is the one I am referring to. And it is real because referring to something is only possible if it exists. Have a nice day.
This is a fine, lengthy exploration of the problem. Though, again, Maudlin alludes to the central problem when he says "then you learn some semantics and discover language doesn't work that way." [I don't like Maudlin, by the way, but I can't deny he's on point here.] A very long time ago, Duns Scotus made the very important observation that the first property language ascribes to anything (and we, when we are using language) is existence. Duns Scotus seems to have been a realist( as opposed to a nominalist, I mean), so this opens a whole can of worms. But the key insight, never stressed enough by subsequent thinkers, is that language itself assumes (or gives an appearance of assuming) existence by the very act of stating something. Your many examples ably deconstruct this: just because a sentence is said, there is clearly a disconnect between some claims "this or that is the case" (Santa Claus, unicorns, god). Good examples, but the pitfall is missing the fact that language itself ascribes (assumes) existence in its very statement. In this sense, whatever "existence" means, it is not existence in some ontological sense, that "no, it really exists" sense, like there's actually a Santa Claus somewhere. But it's also not "existence" even in the "it's the idea of Santa Claus" sense. Again, the missing insight is the one Duns Scotus has already supplied long ago. "Existence" (in the sense being wrangled with here) is actually a characteristic property of language. To put this another way, for species that don't have language, nothing "exists" in this sense. So, the baselessness of Maudlin's larger objection (to Michael) is also in his failure to recognize this characteristic of language, which he is using to deny the validity of Michael's points.
@@talastra thanks. Are you saying (if you aren't it's not a purposeful straw man it's an honest question as I might really not understand) that long ago it was already determined that language has an inherent property namely: it assumes existence. It's a byproduct of language. And if one isn't aware of this byproduct one can come to wrong conclusions such as Santa Claus exists?
@@Contribute_TakeCare_Learn_Play I probably don't help my cause by being long-winded; my attempts to be thorough and adequate in my answers may introduce more issues than they solve. Such is life. If it's not clear what I've said, put it in ChatGPT and say, "What does this mean?" To answer your question: Yes, except it wasn't "long ago determined" and isn't "a byproduct." An integral function or consequence (of language use, if you prefer) is an assertion of the existence of the linguistic reference. I don't mean it is an ontological assertion: if one says "unicorns exist" or "God exists" or "the sun exists," the property of ascription is the same, and it is only a confusion (or a lack of awareness) about how language does this that makes anyone think that the "existence" ascribed in these three sentences is somehow different. Obviously, if there is confusion about this, then it is very simple to end up with confusion and erroneous statements about what is meant by "Santa Claus exists" (or doesn't). St. Anselm famously "proved" the existence of God by (unconsciously) exploiting this confusion. I'm not sure if anyone ever really took his "ontological" proof seriously. However, 2500 years of naive realism also demonstrates that the essence of St. Anselm's proof (which is demonstrably false) is a very popular move, both in philosophy and everyday life. I mean, it really is obvious, yes, that a photograph of a football game is not the football game itself. And if that is obvious, shouldn't it be equally obvious that your perception of reality is not reality itself? You might say, "Well, the photograph certainly captured SOMETHING of reality," but that is not the case. What a camera does is reproduce the human experience of what we call visual experience; it took quite a bit of finagling to get it right. It took even longer to get motion picture film right (and, arguably, that still hasn't happened). The short, pithy summary of this point is: the map is not the territory. The difference is that, for a map (which is something we construct), we can deliberately create a series of correspondences between what is shown on the map and what is the actual territory. However, even these correspondences aren't very reliable, and there is the adorable story of some explorer heading out to Asia in search of the dot on the "i." What I am talking about is not solipsism, nihilism, or a denial of knowledge. That sort of strawman gets brought up not to attack the point I'm making but to try to claim that the alternative (claims about objective reality) is more defensible. They're not. Any claim to a truth-correspondence paradigm is, by definition, untenable, undemonstrable, and (frankly) more akin to a Fundamentalist religion than philosophy. If it isn't clear how things work when one adopts a correct epistemology, I'll break it down. But the main answer to your question is: yes, it is a characteristic aspect of language use that it presupposes the "existence" (in some sense) of the thing spoken about. It needn't involve an ontological claim, though people have made it do so (wrongly, hence St. Anselm's proof and its variants). The way that language works is not (first and foremost) to convey information or meaning; it is to orient one's listener to some (desired) coordination [either to do something, go somewhere, or reach an accord about some matter under discussion]. This, by the way, is why religious types get confused about assertions of atheism. They think that "God doesn't exist" is self-canceling because it is saying the thing it points to does not exist when there it is. The same would hold for "Santa Claus doesn't exist," but for some reason, they don't bother with that fact usually. Rather, the operation of language is simply to direct your attention to the matter at hand, whatever it is: going to the store, discussing ontological claims, or making comments on CZcams. Language can do other things as well, of course. These are simply the two most elemental functions: (1) to orient and coordinate someone else or more toward a desired outcome, and (2) to assert, for the purpose of that orientation and coordination, that the thing asserted is "over there" or "right here" or "in this direction," so that you should pay attention in that direction. It is simply to say: "What am I referring to?" "This." Or "that." Just to repeat: this is an indispensable part of language. If I tried to direct your attention to something that didn't exist (by not indicating where you should direct your attention), you're going to have a hard time directing your attention, won't you? The "existence" that language ascribes is exactly and only this. That people often get confused about "what the signifier signifies" or whether or not a "word must refer to something actual or not" (the unending realist versus nominalist theme in "Western" philosophy) is a downstream consequence of failing to notice what happens automatically and always with any statement in language.
@@Contribute_TakeCare_Learn_Play From ChatGPT: The author's CZcams reply discusses the nature of language and the concept of existence as it is used in linguistic contexts. The author argues that the act of referring to something in language doesn't necessarily make an ontological claim about its existence. For instance, when people say "unicorns exist," "God exists," or "the sun exists," they are using language in the same way, and any perceived difference is due to a misunderstanding of how language functions. The author highlights that misunderstandings about what language signifies can lead to confusion, as seen in historical philosophical arguments like St. Anselm's ontological proof for God's existence. This proof, according to the author, mistakenly conflates linguistic and ontological existence due to a lack of understanding about how language works. The post also makes an analogy between maps and reality to emphasize that representations (like language or photographs) are not the same as the reality they aim to represent. This analogy serves to illustrate that what we perceive or describe is not the same as the actual territory. Furthermore, the author clarifies that language primarily serves to orient and coordinate actions and attention between individuals, rather than to convey objective truths about the world. This orientation is fundamental to language use and is often misunderstood by those who confuse linguistic assertions with claims about objective reality. Overall, the post argues that language is a tool for coordination and orientation, not a medium for making definitive ontological claims. Misunderstandings arise when people fail to recognize this distinction, leading to confused debates about the existence of entities like God, Santa Claus, or unicorns. The "existence" referred to in language is about directing attention, not about asserting the actual, physical existence of entities.
Sorry, every single Christmas, millions or even billions of uncles, dads and other people become Santa Claus for one day. Try I another entity this one does exist.
The actual debate is behind a paywall so I couldn't determine how Tim Maudlin gets to Santa not being real from Parmenides and Spinoza's shared view of 'substance oneness'. That would have been interesting. On the face of this it sounds like Tim contradicts what seems like his apparent position and not just opposes Michael, unless he qualifies Santa as being physically not real but is conceptually, culturally real.
The thing with Parmenides is that nobody actually has a clue what he means. There is no scholar that knows him in any real depth. But as much as people like to say his claims are wrong, his student zeno is very successful through defending him. And though there is little evidence left of what zeno argues he still makes some important arguments for today. I just think Parmenides had something important to say, but we don't know what it is and, this, we should be wary of using him in an argument.
The history of "western" epistemology (says Hilary Putnam, who was a major proponent of it, then became his own starkest critic) is a continuous display of "naive realism". Meinong, Mills, and Aristotle are no exception to that rule. You won't get outside of the dominant and sterile objective/subjective (realist/nominalist) bind or trap of naive realism until you recenter the entire project of understanding--namely by phenomenology, but that quickly became absorbed by and involved in the realist/nominalist (objective/subjective) facade. You'd think Kant would have disabused us of the habit (well, he did, but he ignored himself, so we ignore him as well). To really get more productive insights, it helps to go to a culture with 5000 years of deep consideration of these questions without being mired in the objective/subjective facade. I mean, of course, India and its Vedas, Upanishads, and Kashmiri Shaivism and so forth.
Is this a straw man fallacy ? Let's try to remember that Saint Nicholas was a real historical character. This argument assumes God doesn't exist (good luck proving theres no creator.) and therefore the soul of Santa Claus that are no longer exists... Try to look past the accessories burdened on the historical character, of reindeer, elves, North Poles, and chimneys ....there was a real historical person we're talking about . In fact a very important real historical person.
Tim, Santa Clause is real he is a distant cousin. The clauses have always been around, their Native Canadians. So Santa Claus is A Native Canadian. And he lives at the north pole. Ho ho ho's
@@talastra Yes, and unfortunately we still don’t know how matter can give rise to thoughts and whether consciousness consists of something other than matter.
@@neuhausfm Speak for yourself and those like you if you "don't know." In the first place, there are plenty of people who know, and I have at least spent enough time thinking about it to have a notion of an origin of consciousness. Of course, you can't know how consciousness arises from matter if your search only involves one way of searching for it. If consciousness has a material base not liable to the accepted forms of measurement, then indeed you won't find it. {By this, I do not mean that consciousness must be immaterial, only that it is not liable to measurement in the ways we currently measure things. One way to measure consciousness is qualitatively, ,by asking people; another is phenomenological, as countless meditating monks have for thousands of years. Dismissing the evidence of consciousness because it can't be measured by a yardstick is idiotic; you can't measure temperature with a yardstick as well but that doesn't mean temperature cannot be measured.) The assumption that consciousness must come from matter is an untested hypothesis in the first place, whose continuous failure should be a clue to you that it's the wrong framework. There is an obvious and overwhelming amount of experiential data that proves God does not exist, and yet people keep moving the goalposts to insist otherwise. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest no basis for consciousness in neural correlates, and yet people keep insisting there must be. Exactly the same failures of thinking. As for how consciousness emerges: there is, everywhere in Nature, phenomena that permaculturists originally called "edges"; these are ecological zones where more than one domain overlaps: for example, the salt- and freshwater of estuaries, the shore where the sea and land meet. Factually, an edge is a zone of maximal creativity, where one witnesses the emergence of new phenomena inexplicable in terms of either domain in isolation. Thus, the emergence of euryhaline species; thus the emergence of amphibians. It's always going to be difficult to exactly track emergence versus adaptation, but mangroves, agave cacti, the violet copper butterfly, switchgrass, etc., illustrate Nature's edges at work. For human beings, edges are architectural (wholly artificial) and psychological (social)-the foyers of theaters (as the edge between the "real" world outside and the "imaginary" world onstage) and adolescence, as the edge formed by the intersection of childhood and adulthood. In both of these cases, one cannot explain what happens in a foyer only in terms of the outside real world or the inside imaginary world of the stage. One cannot understand the experience of adolescence solely in the terms of childhood [the onset of puberty is the major separating event] or adulthood [as the adult identity is not legally or psychologically established]. Thus, during adolescence, "identity" itself comes into the picture in a way that cannot be explained by the domain of childhood or adulthood. This is due to the non-linear interaction of dissimilar paradigms (whether you understand these in biological evolutionary terms or as psychological social constructs). The "rules" that govern sea and land are not the same, nor childhood and adulthood. Except for the fact that I have to introduce the categories of odd and even numbers a priori to make the example, you can still note that adding two odd or two even numbers together always gives you an even number. It is only by adding an odd and an even number that you can get another odd number. Some leading researcher in neuroscience admitted recently that there are no neuronal correlates of consciousness with cerebellar activity. Obviously. Consciousness does not emerge from such activity. The disingenuous part of the argument is that "matter" is such a generic term that it means nothing; shall we understand matter as neurons, brain, CNS, body, or universe? The idea that experience requires an "external reality" to occur is already an untestable hypothesis; since consciousness is a model "of Reality" (at the very best), it is inevitable that no correlates exist, since the map is not the territory. These are basic existential and experiential facts that no amount of handwaving can dismiss. As such, consciousness can be explained as arising from the creative edge of awareness and self-awareness and not either of those domains in isolation. Notably, awareness itself is already an emergent phenomenon (characteristic of all living organisms, whether they have a central nervous system or not--see Maturana and Varela's Tree of Knowledge), a fact complicated by the fact that the vast majority of bodily awareness is sunk in unconsciousness (presumably so that more complex psychological and experiential functioning doesn't have to spend resources "thinking" about it or "managing" it). It is extremely difficult, at best, even to come up with an adequate descriptive category for the distinction between what is "awareness" and what counts as "self-awareness". It's not necessary to untangle that problem here. It's quite enough to recognize that consciousness, as you and I both understand it in its prosaic sense, emerges from the creative overlapping edge formed by the domains of awareness and self-awareness. It has no immediate or necessary link to the physical substrate (hence so-called optical illusions, the placebo effect, and a bazillion other things beside). Moreover, the operations of consciousness are vastly more adequately explored in those human domains not burdened by unprovable (and ultimately untenable) ideologies about matter as the origin of everything. The best that "our" (ir)rationalist paradigm can do is project "consciousness" as a physical fact of the universe (Hoffman has already said as much), but the reason consciousness is everywhere we look is that consciousness is a constitutive aspect of being human. Just as the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics makes clear that "properties" are not "external facts" but "internal constructions," this holds for "space" and "time" as much as any other attribute. Physics is already beginning to (begrudgingly) recognize this [see the "amplituhedron"], as a way out of the stagnation its philosophical materialists have backed it into. Once you realize that "matter exists" because we project our experience as such onto the Universe, science will experience another revolution and radically move forward. If this sounds like solipsism to you, you are a victim of the "naive realism" that still largely dominates these sorts of discussions. "Brains" do not exist except that "Mind" says so. Once you recognize the correct order of operations, a lot of "paradoxes" (Zeno's but also Consciousness per se) evaporate.
I personally wouldn’t disregard the existence of Santa Claus like any other religious beliefs and celebrations….. myth or far history there must be something good and why not believe it….. at the same time I don’t believe in material celebration either…
@@NicholasMarshall Math is completely the opposite of an abstraction of this material world. It is, in fact, the most self-consistent fan fiction ever compiled by humanity generally, and its model utility for predicting phenomena in the world is unmatched. But the map is not the territory, and one should never think so. Ohm's Law has never 100% exactly predicted anything and cannot. All it can do is get an adequately close approximation of what is needed, but it's not true. And that's fine. It works, and that's the only genuine metric for our existence in this world in terms of "physical" reality: does something work. This same principle, applied to the social world, becomes the author of oppression and misery and wars in Gaza and Holocausts and the like. It's scaled scientism, and no one should be for it. (Maudlin seems to be for it.) But maybe that's exactly what you meant by noting that math is an imaginary abstraction.
Not true, I saw Santa sitting on the ground drinking a bottle of vodka in the subway station just last week
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but that was your dad
@@user-qh6dk1cs2w Shut up, Mom.
Santa Claus doesn't exist as a physical reality. Santa, and dragons and unicorns exist as ideas.
In the same way there are physical apples but to define what an apple is gets tricky as this is a concept. Apple-ness.
Some are green, some are red, some are sweet, some are sour. Yes they are fruit but so are pears who are closely related genetically.
These are two different ways of existing.
No, this is actually reproducing the error Maudlin is attacking. "Santa Claus" and the "idea of Santa Claus" cannot share the property of existence. When Maudlin says, "Language doesn't work that way," that's what he's referring to. The question hinges on "what is the phrase Santa Claus referring to" (the referent). The referent "exists" in the sense that one simply assumes that Santa Claus "points to" or "refers" to something.
Duns Scotus noted a long time ago that the first property assumed by people and language is "existence" ... meaning that if you say a word, like unicorn or god, then one tacitly assumes that whatever the word evokes has existence. This becomes the basis for the ontological proof of god (flawed), and Maudlin is, again, attacking it and Parmenides. And probably Duns Scotus. But Duns Scotus is right that any word we say is assumed to LEGITIMATELY be referring TO something. In your example, you are saying that the "idea of Santa Claus" exists. This is, of course, a tautology. The "idea" of "idea" and "Santa" and "Claus" and "of" also "exist".
And so it goes.
Everything exists, the important question to answer for each thing is "in what way and in relation to what else?".
"It's a virtue of my theory that it doesn't make any sense" is also what Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. "Saint Paul" said when his stories were questioned by reasonable people.
Rather than admitting defeat, he never gave up and instead came up with even more fallacies, like the "foolishness of God".
And the masses just fell for it.
But of course humanity should believe you, right?
The irony of people like you is that you demand that everyone except what you say even when the arguments you use to discredit others also apply to yourself.
It's a complete lack of self-awareness that is the defining trait of the pseudo-intellectual.
What about Belsnickle (Bell Sniggle), St. Nick or Joulupukki? 🎅
This is a fair representation of the original argument I think.
1. If Santa Claus (the one and only person) doesn't exist, then the words would refer to nothing, making the words devoid of meaning.
2. If the words have no meaning then Santa Claus (the one and only person) doesn't exist.
3. But you do refer to Santa Claus (the one and only person) therefore the words do have a meaning
4. If and since the words do have a meaning they must refer to something that exists
5. Therefore Santa Claus (the one and only person) exists
Let's see if the logic is really as good as it seems.
The problem is that you can put anything here.
Zeus , Thor, unicorn, the duodadokokolos.
This argument’s issue has an ambiguity problem and this argument seems to be begging the question aswell as in it assumes in the conclusion that something referred to must exist, and bases it on a similar premise in different words namely that if we refer to something it must have a meaning otherwise it can't exist. Leaving no true proof. Let's see if it holds up.
If a child says to you (meaning to fool you) , “mommy? see that lamp there?” And points behind you in a closed small white empty room.
You won't see a lamp. This shows we can refer to things that do not exist.
Sure lamps exist. As a concept and as physical objects. But that specific lamp didn't physically exist. So what did he point to that exists? A conceptual projection of the imagination.
1. IF we refer to something THEN it must exist
2. We refer to the flying spaghetti monster
3. Therefore the flying spaghetti monster must exist.
1. solitary person c never sees the woman upstairs anymore (the woman is person b their man is person a)
2. Person c think that person b was murdered by person a. He refers too a friend, about the supposed murder.
3. solitary person c referred to the supposed murder, therefore person a’s supposed murder on person b exists (as in took place)
4. When a murder happens death penalty follows
5. Since the supposed murder exists (took place by proof of 3.) person a will get the death penalty
(So the murder does exist in some form sure, but as what? Are you a writer?, are you imagining? is that truly enough reasonable evidence?)
This further shows the logic’s issues and they are not small. I would not want to live in that person's country if he made laws based on that logic, I would definitely not want to live above him with a woman that divorced me.
Another option: imagine a time before any pyramid was built. And a person has an idea on how to build one.
1. IF we refer to something, THEN it must exist.
2. I the inventor of the pyramid (the concept) refer to the pyramid (the concept) to the king in order to build it.
3. Therefore the pyramid (the concept) does exist
So far so good the pyramid as a concept does exist in this case. But here is where the equivocation fallacy would cause issues.. remember this is before the time any pyramid was built on earth. This is about our own planet and its things in existence.
1. IF we refer to something, THEN it must exist
2. I the inventor of the pyramid (the concept) refer to the pyramid (the concept) to the king in order to build it.
3. Therefore the pyramid (the building) does exist
See? The logic is the same. It if is referred to it must exist the logic states. Sure. But in what form does the "it"exist?
In this case the pyramid (the building does not exist at that time yet seems to be referred to not really though)
Exercise: look in the corner of your room or wherever you can find a corner in your vicinity right now.. can you see the ten eyed spider, the size of an airplane?
No?
Well it MUST EXIST tbat specific one that in that exact spot. Because that is the one I am referring to. And it is real because referring to something is only possible if it exists.
Have a nice day.
This is a fine, lengthy exploration of the problem. Though, again, Maudlin alludes to the central problem when he says "then you learn some semantics and discover language doesn't work that way." [I don't like Maudlin, by the way, but I can't deny he's on point here.]
A very long time ago, Duns Scotus made the very important observation that the first property language ascribes to anything (and we, when we are using language) is existence. Duns Scotus seems to have been a realist( as opposed to a nominalist, I mean), so this opens a whole can of worms. But the key insight, never stressed enough by subsequent thinkers, is that language itself assumes (or gives an appearance of assuming) existence by the very act of stating something.
Your many examples ably deconstruct this: just because a sentence is said, there is clearly a disconnect between some claims "this or that is the case" (Santa Claus, unicorns, god). Good examples, but the pitfall is missing the fact that language itself ascribes (assumes) existence in its very statement. In this sense, whatever "existence" means, it is not existence in some ontological sense, that "no, it really exists" sense, like there's actually a Santa Claus somewhere. But it's also not "existence" even in the "it's the idea of Santa Claus" sense.
Again, the missing insight is the one Duns Scotus has already supplied long ago. "Existence" (in the sense being wrangled with here) is actually a characteristic property of language. To put this another way, for species that don't have language, nothing "exists" in this sense.
So, the baselessness of Maudlin's larger objection (to Michael) is also in his failure to recognize this characteristic of language, which he is using to deny the validity of Michael's points.
@@talastra thanks. Are you saying (if you aren't it's not a purposeful straw man it's an honest question as I might really not understand) that long ago it was already determined that language has an inherent property namely: it assumes existence. It's a byproduct of language. And if one isn't aware of this byproduct one can come to wrong conclusions such as Santa Claus exists?
@@Contribute_TakeCare_Learn_Play I probably don't help my cause by being long-winded; my attempts to be thorough and adequate in my answers may introduce more issues than they solve. Such is life. If it's not clear what I've said, put it in ChatGPT and say, "What does this mean?"
To answer your question: Yes, except it wasn't "long ago determined" and isn't "a byproduct." An integral function or consequence (of language use, if you prefer) is an assertion of the existence of the linguistic reference.
I don't mean it is an ontological assertion: if one says "unicorns exist" or "God exists" or "the sun exists," the property of ascription is the same, and it is only a confusion (or a lack of awareness) about how language does this that makes anyone think that the "existence" ascribed in these three sentences is somehow different.
Obviously, if there is confusion about this, then it is very simple to end up with confusion and erroneous statements about what is meant by "Santa Claus exists" (or doesn't). St. Anselm famously "proved" the existence of God by (unconsciously) exploiting this confusion. I'm not sure if anyone ever really took his "ontological" proof seriously. However, 2500 years of naive realism also demonstrates that the essence of St. Anselm's proof (which is demonstrably false) is a very popular move, both in philosophy and everyday life.
I mean, it really is obvious, yes, that a photograph of a football game is not the football game itself. And if that is obvious, shouldn't it be equally obvious that your perception of reality is not reality itself? You might say, "Well, the photograph certainly captured SOMETHING of reality," but that is not the case. What a camera does is reproduce the human experience of what we call visual experience; it took quite a bit of finagling to get it right. It took even longer to get motion picture film right (and, arguably, that still hasn't happened).
The short, pithy summary of this point is: the map is not the territory. The difference is that, for a map (which is something we construct), we can deliberately create a series of correspondences between what is shown on the map and what is the actual territory. However, even these correspondences aren't very reliable, and there is the adorable story of some explorer heading out to Asia in search of the dot on the "i."
What I am talking about is not solipsism, nihilism, or a denial of knowledge. That sort of strawman gets brought up not to attack the point I'm making but to try to claim that the alternative (claims about objective reality) is more defensible. They're not. Any claim to a truth-correspondence paradigm is, by definition, untenable, undemonstrable, and (frankly) more akin to a Fundamentalist religion than philosophy. If it isn't clear how things work when one adopts a correct epistemology, I'll break it down.
But the main answer to your question is: yes, it is a characteristic aspect of language use that it presupposes the "existence" (in some sense) of the thing spoken about. It needn't involve an ontological claim, though people have made it do so (wrongly, hence St. Anselm's proof and its variants).
The way that language works is not (first and foremost) to convey information or meaning; it is to orient one's listener to some (desired) coordination [either to do something, go somewhere, or reach an accord about some matter under discussion]. This, by the way, is why religious types get confused about assertions of atheism. They think that "God doesn't exist" is self-canceling because it is saying the thing it points to does not exist when there it is. The same would hold for "Santa Claus doesn't exist," but for some reason, they don't bother with that fact usually. Rather, the operation of language is simply to direct your attention to the matter at hand, whatever it is: going to the store, discussing ontological claims, or making comments on CZcams.
Language can do other things as well, of course. These are simply the two most elemental functions: (1) to orient and coordinate someone else or more toward a desired outcome, and (2) to assert, for the purpose of that orientation and coordination, that the thing asserted is "over there" or "right here" or "in this direction," so that you should pay attention in that direction. It is simply to say: "What am I referring to?" "This." Or "that."
Just to repeat: this is an indispensable part of language. If I tried to direct your attention to something that didn't exist (by not indicating where you should direct your attention), you're going to have a hard time directing your attention, won't you? The "existence" that language ascribes is exactly and only this. That people often get confused about "what the signifier signifies" or whether or not a "word must refer to something actual or not" (the unending realist versus nominalist theme in "Western" philosophy) is a downstream consequence of failing to notice what happens automatically and always with any statement in language.
@@Contribute_TakeCare_Learn_Play From ChatGPT:
The author's CZcams reply discusses the nature of language and the concept of existence as it is used in linguistic contexts. The author argues that the act of referring to something in language doesn't necessarily make an ontological claim about its existence. For instance, when people say "unicorns exist," "God exists," or "the sun exists," they are using language in the same way, and any perceived difference is due to a misunderstanding of how language functions.
The author highlights that misunderstandings about what language signifies can lead to confusion, as seen in historical philosophical arguments like St. Anselm's ontological proof for God's existence. This proof, according to the author, mistakenly conflates linguistic and ontological existence due to a lack of understanding about how language works.
The post also makes an analogy between maps and reality to emphasize that representations (like language or photographs) are not the same as the reality they aim to represent. This analogy serves to illustrate that what we perceive or describe is not the same as the actual territory.
Furthermore, the author clarifies that language primarily serves to orient and coordinate actions and attention between individuals, rather than to convey objective truths about the world. This orientation is fundamental to language use and is often misunderstood by those who confuse linguistic assertions with claims about objective reality.
Overall, the post argues that language is a tool for coordination and orientation, not a medium for making definitive ontological claims. Misunderstandings arise when people fail to recognize this distinction, leading to confused debates about the existence of entities like God, Santa Claus, or unicorns. The "existence" referred to in language is about directing attention, not about asserting the actual, physical existence of entities.
That there is no multiplicity as parmenides states is not a matter of semantics. It is about thinking what the world is devoid of subjects
But the word Santa Claus absolutely comes from a historical person who did exist so this is the worst example he could have picked.
The referent of the phrase Santa Claus is not the historical St. Nicholas.
Sorry, every single Christmas, millions or even billions of uncles, dads and other people become Santa Claus for one day. Try I another entity this one does exist.
I agree! Philosophy hurts, mentally and spiritually!
The actual debate is behind a paywall so I couldn't determine how Tim Maudlin gets to Santa not being real from Parmenides and Spinoza's shared view of 'substance oneness'. That would have been interesting. On the face of this it sounds like Tim contradicts what seems like his apparent position and not just opposes Michael, unless he qualifies Santa as being physically not real but is conceptually, culturally real.
The thing with Parmenides is that nobody actually has a clue what he means. There is no scholar that knows him in any real depth. But as much as people like to say his claims are wrong, his student zeno is very successful through defending him. And though there is little evidence left of what zeno argues he still makes some important arguments for today.
I just think Parmenides had something important to say, but we don't know what it is and, this, we should be wary of using him in an argument.
He's deep down the rabbit hole
Gibberish.
Yes. And same with Heraclitus.
Well, get to work on the exposition then. :)
He means THE Santa Claus. 😂
This guy still believes in truth??!! Ppffftt, get with the program.
It doesn't matter if it's true, it only matters that people believe you...
The argument that something "is true" is the favored way to elicit people's belief.
@talastra let me test you in this, what you wrote, do you believe it to be truth?
This is why I chose not to be a philosophy major.
Best comment! Well said!
You went with economics instead?
You can say santa claus exists as an imaginary character.
Just like god.
@@hippyjason Bingo
@@hippyjason I tell christians flat out that their god only exists in their imagination. It's an accurate statement. 😁.
A philosopher fixed this problem by adding exists as fiction check out the book ordinary objects.
No, they didn't. Pretending that "exists" is somehow categorical different between so called "things" and "ideas" is not a solution to the problem.
Did he miss Meinong? And Mills? And Aristotle, that it is potential?
The history of "western" epistemology (says Hilary Putnam, who was a major proponent of it, then became his own starkest critic) is a continuous display of "naive realism". Meinong, Mills, and Aristotle are no exception to that rule.
You won't get outside of the dominant and sterile objective/subjective (realist/nominalist) bind or trap of naive realism until you recenter the entire project of understanding--namely by phenomenology, but that quickly became absorbed by and involved in the realist/nominalist (objective/subjective) facade. You'd think Kant would have disabused us of the habit (well, he did, but he ignored himself, so we ignore him as well).
To really get more productive insights, it helps to go to a culture with 5000 years of deep consideration of these questions without being mired in the objective/subjective facade. I mean, of course, India and its Vedas, Upanishads, and Kashmiri Shaivism and so forth.
Is this a straw man fallacy ?
Let's try to remember that Saint Nicholas was a real historical character.
This argument assumes God doesn't exist (good luck proving theres no creator.) and therefore the soul of Santa Claus that are no longer exists...
Try to look past the accessories burdened on the historical character, of reindeer, elves, North Poles, and chimneys ....there was a real historical person we're talking about . In fact a very important real historical person.
Tim, Santa Clause is real he is a distant cousin. The clauses have always been around, their Native Canadians. So Santa Claus is A Native Canadian. And he lives at the north pole. Ho ho ho's
This philosopher of science seems to be a realist, but is very biased about realistic theories in quantum mechanics.
Do your thoughts exist ?
Shouldn't you be asking yourself that?
@@talastra I did. So I came to the conclusion that thoughts, dreams and my fictions of Santa Clause do exist.
@@neuhausfm Yes, because attributing the property of existence is an integral part of language itself. It's an artifact of using language.
@@talastra Yes, and unfortunately we still don’t know how matter can give rise to thoughts and whether consciousness consists of something other than matter.
@@neuhausfm Speak for yourself and those like you if you "don't know." In the first place, there are plenty of people who know, and I have at least spent enough time thinking about it to have a notion of an origin of consciousness.
Of course, you can't know how consciousness arises from matter if your search only involves one way of searching for it. If consciousness has a material base not liable to the accepted forms of measurement, then indeed you won't find it. {By this, I do not mean that consciousness must be immaterial, only that it is not liable to measurement in the ways we currently measure things. One way to measure consciousness is qualitatively, ,by asking people; another is phenomenological, as countless meditating monks have for thousands of years. Dismissing the evidence of consciousness because it can't be measured by a yardstick is idiotic; you can't measure temperature with a yardstick as well but that doesn't mean temperature cannot be measured.)
The assumption that consciousness must come from matter is an untested hypothesis in the first place, whose continuous failure should be a clue to you that it's the wrong framework. There is an obvious and overwhelming amount of experiential data that proves God does not exist, and yet people keep moving the goalposts to insist otherwise. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest no basis for consciousness in neural correlates, and yet people keep insisting there must be. Exactly the same failures of thinking.
As for how consciousness emerges: there is, everywhere in Nature, phenomena that permaculturists originally called "edges"; these are ecological zones where more than one domain overlaps: for example, the salt- and freshwater of estuaries, the shore where the sea and land meet. Factually, an edge is a zone of maximal creativity, where one witnesses the emergence of new phenomena inexplicable in terms of either domain in isolation. Thus, the emergence of euryhaline species; thus the emergence of amphibians. It's always going to be difficult to exactly track emergence versus adaptation, but mangroves, agave cacti, the violet copper butterfly, switchgrass, etc., illustrate Nature's edges at work.
For human beings, edges are architectural (wholly artificial) and psychological (social)-the foyers of theaters (as the edge between the "real" world outside and the "imaginary" world onstage) and adolescence, as the edge formed by the intersection of childhood and adulthood. In both of these cases, one cannot explain what happens in a foyer only in terms of the outside real world or the inside imaginary world of the stage. One cannot understand the experience of adolescence solely in the terms of childhood [the onset of puberty is the major separating event] or adulthood [as the adult identity is not legally or psychologically established]. Thus, during adolescence, "identity" itself comes into the picture in a way that cannot be explained by the domain of childhood or adulthood.
This is due to the non-linear interaction of dissimilar paradigms (whether you understand these in biological evolutionary terms or as psychological social constructs). The "rules" that govern sea and land are not the same, nor childhood and adulthood. Except for the fact that I have to introduce the categories of odd and even numbers a priori to make the example, you can still note that adding two odd or two even numbers together always gives you an even number. It is only by adding an odd and an even number that you can get another odd number.
Some leading researcher in neuroscience admitted recently that there are no neuronal correlates of consciousness with cerebellar activity. Obviously. Consciousness does not emerge from such activity. The disingenuous part of the argument is that "matter" is such a generic term that it means nothing; shall we understand matter as neurons, brain, CNS, body, or universe? The idea that experience requires an "external reality" to occur is already an untestable hypothesis; since consciousness is a model "of Reality" (at the very best), it is inevitable that no correlates exist, since the map is not the territory. These are basic existential and experiential facts that no amount of handwaving can dismiss.
As such, consciousness can be explained as arising from the creative edge of awareness and self-awareness and not either of those domains in isolation. Notably, awareness itself is already an emergent phenomenon (characteristic of all living organisms, whether they have a central nervous system or not--see Maturana and Varela's Tree of Knowledge), a fact complicated by the fact that the vast majority of bodily awareness is sunk in unconsciousness (presumably so that more complex psychological and experiential functioning doesn't have to spend resources "thinking" about it or "managing" it). It is extremely difficult, at best, even to come up with an adequate descriptive category for the distinction between what is "awareness" and what counts as "self-awareness".
It's not necessary to untangle that problem here. It's quite enough to recognize that consciousness, as you and I both understand it in its prosaic sense, emerges from the creative overlapping edge formed by the domains of awareness and self-awareness. It has no immediate or necessary link to the physical substrate (hence so-called optical illusions, the placebo effect, and a bazillion other things beside). Moreover, the operations of consciousness are vastly more adequately explored in those human domains not burdened by unprovable (and ultimately untenable) ideologies about matter as the origin of everything. The best that "our" (ir)rationalist paradigm can do is project "consciousness" as a physical fact of the universe (Hoffman has already said as much), but the reason consciousness is everywhere we look is that consciousness is a constitutive aspect of being human. Just as the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics makes clear that "properties" are not "external facts" but "internal constructions," this holds for "space" and "time" as much as any other attribute. Physics is already beginning to (begrudgingly) recognize this [see the "amplituhedron"], as a way out of the stagnation its philosophical materialists have backed it into.
Once you realize that "matter exists" because we project our experience as such onto the Universe, science will experience another revolution and radically move forward. If this sounds like solipsism to you, you are a victim of the "naive realism" that still largely dominates these sorts of discussions. "Brains" do not exist except that "Mind" says so. Once you recognize the correct order of operations, a lot of "paradoxes" (Zeno's but also Consciousness per se) evaporate.
Amazing these people get paid for this 😣
Thank you for collecting my garbage.
I disagree.
I personally wouldn’t disregard the existence of Santa Claus like any other religious beliefs and celebrations….. myth or far history there must be something good and why not believe it….. at the same time I don’t believe in material celebration either…
Concepts do work that way, but that would require understanding of psychology. This guy is just hard academia drivel.
that's stupid, that would mean imaging things and a lot of maths wouldn't exist
Existing in brains, but in reality?
@@Thomas-gk42 what?
Yes, just because you imagine a thing doesn't mean it exists in the material world.
And math is an abstraction of this material world.
@@NicholasMarshall Math is completely the opposite of an abstraction of this material world. It is, in fact, the most self-consistent fan fiction ever compiled by humanity generally, and its model utility for predicting phenomena in the world is unmatched. But the map is not the territory, and one should never think so.
Ohm's Law has never 100% exactly predicted anything and cannot. All it can do is get an adequately close approximation of what is needed, but it's not true. And that's fine. It works, and that's the only genuine metric for our existence in this world in terms of "physical" reality: does something work.
This same principle, applied to the social world, becomes the author of oppression and misery and wars in Gaza and Holocausts and the like. It's scaled scientism, and no one should be for it. (Maudlin seems to be for it.)
But maybe that's exactly what you meant by noting that math is an imaginary abstraction.