From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 9:34 PM To: Alt.Atheism.Moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. "HeckleAndJeckle" wrote > "Possible worlds" is a concept. The referent is an idea & a handle to a > possible other referent which may not exist in whatever context exists > means for such objects. The term I said has no referent in this context is 'exists', not 'possible worlds'. > Are you referring to ideas with meanings decided on by linguistic > communities or are you referring to a possible objects whose properties > can not be decided on by "linguistic communities"? Possible worlds are the former, and by definition cannot be the latter, since they are in principle impossible to examine. > That no one satisfies you with an argument, demonstrates necessarily > nothing. It demonstrates precisely what I said it demonstrates: that 'existence' has not been distinguished from mere possibility for possible worlds. Your use of 'necessarily' is an obvious distortion of my claim, which I've diagnosed as such every time you've attempted it. > there is an equivocation > here between an idea of a world & a possible world-in-itself. So, trying > to assign any properties to that world-in-itself without any data of that > world is an argument from ignorance. Only if you're some kind of Platonist -- in which case, your criteria for what is "real" are so hopelessly different from mine as to make this conversation pointless. > It's trivial because it's necessarily true that if an idea of worlds exist > then that idea has actuality as being an idea. Congratulations, you've utterly failed to correctly paraphrase my claim, which was: "lexicographically, 'existence' for possible worlds is either nonsensical, or is indistinguishable from mere possibility." -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net