[lit-ideas] Re: Mop Rumpchuck
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:15:09 -0800
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
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