[lit-ideas] Re: Mop Rumpchuck

One thing that would help me. Could someone please send me off-list anything he or she remembers from our many exchanges about whether "is that real" is, or is not, an interesting philosophical question? 

David,
I'll send it on-list because it seems to be a slow day, what with Lawrence off in Europe doing historical research, and Mike Geary holed up in a cabin in Maine, putting the finishing semi-colons into the Work in Progress.
I remember several discussions that might resemble the one you're interested in, but none of them, as far as I can recall were in response to the question 'Is that real?' 'Is that real?' doesn't strike me as an interesting philosophical question, any more than 'Is that a cat?' does. 'Is that real?'seems to be sensibly askable only in some setting in which the 'reality' of some particular thing is not immediately apparent, e.g., when being shown something that resembles a thousand dollar bill, the person being shown it might ask, 'Is that real?' where being real is contrasted with its being counterfeit or fake.
Here, I'll once more invoke J. L. Austin's reminder that 'real' is, in his words, 'substantive hungry.' That is: when we ask if something is real, we need to be able to answer the question 'A real what?' (a real Jackson Pollock, say). A decoy is not a real duck but it's a real decoy, and good ones are much prized by hunters and collectors. Decoy collectors do not want taxidermized ducks or even live ducks, and hunters do not hunt decoys, even though they may willfully or accidentally shoot them.
I recall that Mike Chase and I did a logical dance around the question of whether or not there were things, independently of there being things of a certain kind. He was the Platonist, I was the Ockhamite. Who had the better routine is still debated.
Philosophical sceptics often dare other philosophers to demonstrate that there is a sure-fire way of distinguishing appearance from reality, so that it might appear that there was global, non-specific question about how we know that what we experience is reality itself and not just a bunch of conveniently coagulated sense-data. (Kant thought that we did the best we could with what we have.)
In the Sophist, and Theatetus, some of Plato's characters worry about being and non-being, and end up wondering how it is possible to speak of that-which-is-not. Russell and Meinong had the same worry: Whitehead was right about the footnotes. 

Robert Paul
The Mutton Institute
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: