 Hello my friends, welcome to the 57th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Today is going to be a breakdown of one of my favorite conversations in this series so far. It was episode number 33 with Dr. Jody Azuni. The topic was, do mathematical objects exist? And the first half of our conversation is what I want to break down, because we talk about the metaphysics of concepts. And the relationship between language and the world. It's directly related to the metaphysics of mathematical objects. Dr. Azuni doesn't believe that mathematical objects exist. Most philosophers of mathematics think that mathematical objects do exist and they exist separate of our minds. My position is a third option where I think, yes, mathematical objects exist, but they do not exist separate of our minds. Numbers and mathematical objects in general are ideas. When we stop thinking about them, they stop existing. They're mind dependent objects. And Dr. Azuni and I have a great conversation about this notion of mind dependent existence. If you've been following along with the show, you know I've been doing quite a lot of traveling and I am officially now, as of this episode, back in the States. I'm back home in upstate New York. I've got a few small destinations yet to go on the list, but I think things are going to be calm for at least the next couple of months. It's been a crazy journey. I obviously have lots to say, lots that I've learned over the last year, but that will be a topic for another time. Before we dive into this interview breakdown, I want to tell you about the sponsor of the show Praxis. This is all about you being able to take control of your own career. Not sitting around waiting for permission to create value for people. Not waiting for the credentials so that other people take you seriously. No, it's about getting your feet wet right away and avoiding the $100,000 of unnecessary college debt that most young people bind themselves to before even having any real world job experience. Instead of taking a bunch of classes, taught by professors who don't really care about their subject matter or who really know what they're talking about and have never experienced the world themselves, you get a cut through all the crap and go straight to the marketplace. If this sounds like something you're interested, go to stevedashpatterson.com slash praxis. So let's dive into the interview and analysis of my conversation with Dr. Jody Azuni. When we use numbers and we make mathematical claims, what are the actual objects that we're talking about? Is what is a number? When we say two plus two equals four, what is two in the first place? OK, I'm going to describe my position. My position is that numbers don't exist. I'm a nominalist. My position is that lots of things don't exist. All right, this is an excellent place to start. He's a nominalist, which means that in general, what we think of as objects are really just names. That's where the term nominalism comes from. In many circumstances, I am super favorable to nominalism because if you're a nominalist, it reduces the amount of existing things that are out there. So one of the areas in my own worldview where I'm very close to nominalism is with just the existence of ordinary objects. So if I have a water bottle in front of me, I like to say that, well, there isn't a water bottle per se that's out there in the world. What we mean by a water bottle is simply we're referencing bits of matter that are arranged in a particular way. There's no independent object that is the water bottle. The thing that is independent is just the bits of matter, the fundamental units of matter, which are arranged such that we call it a water bottle. Now, if you take that position, that means you can reduce your ontology quite a bit. In other words, you can reduce the list of things that you think exist. If there were no minds in my own metaphysics, there would be no such thing as water bottles. There would still be bits of matter and maybe even bits of matter arranged in the way that we call water bottles, but there's no independent object that is a water bottle. So Dr. Razzuni takes this type of logic and he simply applies it consistently. It says, well, maybe it's the same thing with numbers, that there's really no such thing out there as a number. Now, the first thing that I want to say about this is I'm very hesitant to say things like X doesn't exist and X doesn't exist in any way. Because if we're talking about X, then it seems like we're talking about something. Now, if I were to talk about a unicorn, let's say, you could, in unusual language, we say, oh, unicorns don't exist. But for being super strict, my position is, yes, of course, unicorns exist, but they exist in our minds. They're ideas. Those ideas that we have don't correlate to independent things in the world. There are no unicorns in the world. There's no spatially extended thing that is actually a unicorn. But of course, unicorns exist. That's how we can say true and false things about unicorns is because they're ideas on our heads. My first focus in my earliest work was mathematical objects. And I became very interested in the main reasons that philosophers were pushing for why they did exist, which was a kind of indispensability argument. Okay, so this is, I think, a pretty fair summarization. I actually ran into this argument when I was talking with Timothy Williams and at Oxford, which was what you could consider an indispensability argument. In other words, yes, mathematical objects exist and they probably exist separate of our minds because I can say things like 1.8 million years ago, there were dinosaurs, there were, you know, 448,000 dinosaurs that roamed the North America. I just made that, those numbers up. But that's the idea is we can describe things that happen in a quantifiable way a million years ago prior to our own existence or a billion years ago or whatever. The argument goes, the only way we can do that is if there's some kind of real existence to numbers. Now, Dr. Zuni doesn't find that compelling. I don't find that particularly compelling, but we don't find it compelling for different reasons. In natural language, I tend to have lots and lots of examples of statements that we make that are true, that use there is statements, but we don't commit ourselves and we don't give it to you. Give us a few examples of that. Oh, absolutely. There are as many Greek goddesses as Greek gods. There are cartoon characters and animators who resemble one another. Okay. And that particular one that there is is as it's sometimes put quantifying over both something I take to exist, namely animators and something I don't take to exist, namely cartoon characters. You and I might be in the peculiar position of dreaming of the same imaginary woman nightly. So we would say there is an imaginary woman. We dream of her when we might compare notes. Yeah, she was dressed and wearing the same thing the other night, blah, blah, blah. There are what are called hobnob puzzles kind of due to a geek, which say things like knob thinks that a certain witch has poisoned his pig and hob worries that the same witch has killed his cow, where the speaker doesn't think there is a witch. And so there's lots of examples like this where items that are playing these quantifier roles are nevertheless the sentences are non-committing, but true. And that's key. Excellent examples. In fact, I would probably use these examples if I were to make my own points in metaphysics because they're so good. So usually when we're talking about fictional characters, we're talking about the witch with the poisonous brew that poisons the apple, we say things like, oh, that witch doesn't exist. But that to me is just not philosophically precise. What we really mean to say is the idea that I'm talking about in my head has no physical correlation or independent existence outside of my head. That's what we mean by there's no witch, you know, witches don't exist. Well, that means the very clear concept and idea that I'm talking about that I could say true and false things about in my head does not correspond to the world. This is a very different perspective. I'm saying those ideas that we're talking about don't exist at all. You have to assume a kind of all existent things are physically your spatio temporally existent in order to make this nominalism work. So this forces you into positions like, well, ideas don't exist. Why is it that ideas don't exist when we can talk about them and we live in the world of ideas? Well, ideas don't exist because they don't have physical spatio temporal existence. I just find that a really weird use of the term exist. You can you can I'm fine if we want to give that word exist. But then what is the nature of ideas? What's the metaphysical ontological status of ideas? If we're saying, oh, they don't exist because they don't have these particular properties. OK, well, there's still some things and they still have to have some kind of properties. So what is the nature of those properties? There's a lot of philosophical flanks to fill here. How do these things get to be true if there's no objects that are being talked about and you have to tell a story? And how do these truths operate with with sentences that are this way? How can we have the kind of attitudes we have towards these things if they don't exist? Sure. So I tell stories about all these things. This is why I spend so much time writing philosophy because the nominalist position. If you go this route opens up a lot of other things you have to tell stories about. OK, so he gets this, right? He gets that it seems like when we're talking about things, we have to that those things have to exist. And so he says we have to tell stories. Now, this is kind of the first red flag where I'm don't I'm very skeptical of the idea of we have to tell stories. That's at least certainly not the way that I would put it. And something that I've noticed in the world of philosophy in the world of ideas in general, people love storytelling. They love there's a there's a kind of playfulness. There's a kind of almost childlike playfulness to a way to the way that a lot of philosophers and takers approach their subject matter. There's kind of a I guess you could call it a lack of seriousness. Now, my disposition is to say, don't tell me any stories. I don't want to hear the stories. Just tell me the facts. Tell me the arguments explained to me in a nonfiction way. But this is his his chosen method is to try to tell stories. So maybe it's just a stylistic difference, but it's not exactly my cup of tea. So there's something I call the aboutness illusion, which I think very powerfully drives not just the the need to believe in mathematical objects, but the need to believe in fictional objects. And the aboutness illusion takes the following form. Let's say you and I agree, there's no Hercules. And let's say you and I agree, there's no Pegasus. There's no object in any sense at all. So there's nothing that has properties, because if it doesn't exist at all, it doesn't have any properties. Nevertheless, we have a rather unavoidable cognitive impression that if I say Pegasus doesn't exist, I'm speaking of something specific that doesn't exist. And if I say Hercules doesn't exist, I'm speaking of something else specific that doesn't exist. It's not the same as the Pegasus. But if you're going to strictly say these things don't exist, that's not correct. OK, now that cognitive illusion, I think, drives a lot of very weird philosophical positions. My Nongianism views that fictional objects do exist, because how else could, or the hallucination, is that a dagger I see before me? He's thinking of a specific non-existent object that's floating right there. This is very powerful. Now, I don't actually see the problem here to say, yes, well, we have this overwhelming urge to say, you know, that the ideas do exist, the Pegasus does exist, because it's distinct from Hercules. But that only presents us with a problem if we accept, off the get-go, that existing things must physically exist. If we are non-physicalists, we say, well, some things can exist that aren't physical, this presents no problem, because, as I've said a couple of times already, Pegasus exists as an idea on our head, Pegasus does not exist as a physically-existent object in the world. There's no issue there. I don't know anybody that would disagree. I don't know anybody that thinks Pegasus actually exists independent of our mind, so this doesn't strike me as an illusion. The aboutness illusion doesn't strike me as an illusion at all, it just strikes me as a feature of language that not everything we're talking about has a physical correlate and yet we can still talk about it, because it has a mind-dependent existence. We have to ask you, what do you mean by exist? Because if we're talking about something, isn't a necessary part of something being a something is that it is, it is existent. How can you have something that isn't? Well, that's right, but keep in mind what's going on here is you need to say, how can I have something that isn't? I can't. How can I use the word something to talk about what doesn't exist? I can, but let's not put it that way. Let's put it a different way, a way that's going to push back on this temptation, which is let's just talk about the fact that some of our names don't refer and some of our terms don't refer, okay? So when I use the word Hercules and I use the word Pegasus, these don't refer to anything. Well, I won't grant that Pegasus and Hercules don't refer. I would say by virtue of the fact that they are terms that have meaning, they're referring to something. However, I thought it was reflective of his capacity as a philosopher when he said, well, we can't say that there is something that isn't. He said, that would be impossible, but what he's saying is, well, then how can we use the word something to talk about what doesn't exist? Now, while that I think is clever and he grasps the issue at play here, I think he just hides behind a word. So he says, how can we use the term, the word something, to talk about what doesn't exist? Another way you could phrase that is by saying, how could we use the term something to talk about things that don't exist? So obviously you can't talk about a thing that isn't because it wouldn't be a thing. So he says, well, how can we talk about what doesn't exist? Well, what is the what? Talk about non-existent what that still to me implies thing-ness. And now what we're really focused on is the question of how can a sentence like Pegasus is depicted in ancient Greek mythology as a flying horse? How can that sentence be true if there's a word in it that doesn't refer? And that's a different point. And now I have to tell a story. And I do tell a story which involves something I call truth inducing, which is we do fiction and we do mythology. And then we talk about the mythology. And in particular, we talk about the contents. And the way we do it is we formulate terms that don't refer to anything. And we give them a truth value based on the nature of the story. Okay, so he tries to get around this metaphysical problem by saying, well, what truth and falsehood have to do with in fiction is talking about whether or not our claims cohere to a story, not whether or not our claims cohere to some kind of objects in the world? Trouble is, what is a story? The story is not some physically existent thing and it still puts, I would say my resolution perfectly solves this. I also would claim that propositions about Sherlock Holmes aren't true or false based on whether or not they objectively cohere in a physical way to Sherlock Holmes that existed in London. Of course, that's not true. My claim is precisely the story in our head, the concepts and ideas that we're conceiving of. We can say true and false things about, but those concepts are themselves objects. When I'm thinking about a red elephant that speaks English, that concept is an object in my head. That's why I can say it would be false to claim that the red elephant speaks Spanish, because in my head, the red elephant speaks English, not Spanish, and he's not bilingual. This also satisfactorily gives you a metaphysical status of the story. If truth and falsehood are about coherence to a story, well, you still have to place the story as an existing thing somewhere, right? Well, this is very easy in my own worldview, stories are in our heads. Without minds, there would be no such thing as stories. There might be ink on paper, but there wouldn't be the concepts and ideas that we're talking about when we're talking about stories. So that we can say correctly, Sherlock Holmes is depicted in the Arthur Collin Doyle stories as a detective living in Victorian England, Victorian London, let's say. So we can say something like that. And now I'm talking about a sentence. I am not talking about an object. Now psychologically, we experience it a certain way. We're thinking about it just as we do with novels. We recognize these things don't exist, and yet we think about them. He said, so we're talking about a sentence, not an object. And again, what is a sentence? If we're talking about a sentence as a thing is distinct from other things, that strikes me as an existing thing. And again, sentences are my independent objects in my worldview. They don't exist outside of our conception of them, but they certainly do exist while they are being conceived. So would you say then you can't reference Sherlock Holmes outside of a sentence or outside of a story or that? Well, no, you don't reference him period. But there are sentences in which the word occurs, which have truth values. Okay. And those sentences get their truth values in some derivative sense from the stories. But you can compare Sherlock Holmes across stories. You can talk about Sherlock Holmes in movies. You can compare Sherlock Holmes. I can say Sherlock Holmes is depicted in all the fiction he appears in as far smarter than Donald Trump is depicted in anything that talks about him. Perfectly good sentence. One that's not true because of, as it turns out. Well, when you say stories that's depicted in stories, does a story have an existence then? For the sake of our conversation, let's take stories to exist. What they actually are might be words on paper, interpreted sentences, etc. So there you go. I think this position is kind of forced that you're kind of kicking the can down the road of what things exist. And he says, well, they might be interpreted words on paper. I say, okay, what is interpretation? In my worldview, at some point, you're going to bump up against the non-physical. You're going to bump up against, well, what we're talking about is an idea, as a concept, is some part in our mind and not some physically existing thing. And he wants to try to get around that and say, well, yes, stories are the things that exist. But what we mean by the stories is the ink on paper or interpreted words. I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite clear on the interpretation end of what he means by that. But to me, it just seems like kind of bending over backwards to explain away any type of mind dependent existence. I have very radical views about what ends up existing at the end of the day. Okay, well, I have a book, which unfortunately I don't have here, so I can't give it to you. But I can always send it to you if you can give me the address called Semantic Perception, How the Illusion of a Public Language Arises and Persists. So that also focuses on certain other class of what I call cognitive illusions. What's going on in semantic perception is the idea is you and I have basically language organs. I'm going to use Chomsky style language here. I'm very sympathetic to a lot of what Chomsky has to say about this. As it were, each of us has a faculty, a language faculty. What it produces is we end up competent in an ideolect, an individual ideolect. I have mine. You have yours. That's going on here. They overlap sufficiently that we enjoy successful communication, but they're not exact. But that's not our experience. Our experience is very different. Our experience, you're a native English speaker. You have an involuntary experience of meaningful words on a page. There is no object like that in the world. There is design. There is just ink on a page here. Nevertheless, we involuntarily project that into the world. And we furthermore have the experience. I have the experience that this has a meaning as well as a grammar. But I'm really focused on its meaning. And I am experiencing you in the successful communication as having, as seeing the same thing that I am, just as I see you as seeing this pen, just as I do. But that is a, almost I want to call it a collective hallucination. That, that object is not out there. Again, I think this is a really interesting position because I actually agree with a lot of it except that I think it implies non-physical existence. When he says, you know, meaning isn't out there in the world. We project it. Well, what does that mean? First of all, how's that possible? I'd love to know the philosophy of mine behind this. But the idea that meaning isn't out there and yet meaning is certainly a word that has meaning to describe some difference in the universe. Well, doesn't that get you to the contents and goings on of our mind are not objective existent things out there, that there isn't meaning in the world. But there's certainly meaning and there's certainly meaning in our heads. So doesn't that imply this divide between what exists in the world and what exists in our mind? But to turn around and take this hard nominalist position and to say, the meaning that is in our heads is projected onto the world, but the meaning doesn't exist strikes me very, very oddly. Is your claim that what you could call concepts, maybe, that those don't actually exist? I was focusing specifically on public language. Concept, if we think of it as a mental entity, I mean, concept and philosophy, there's a use of it where it's a kind of public entity. But concept, actually concept is this mongrel concept that's used in all sorts of ways. But if you're thinking of it as a mental entity, there is this, we have a psychological theory, a folk psychological theory, which talks about all sorts of entities, images, etc., etc. If that theory actually refers to anything or not, I'm not prepared to say. I love this little comment. I've bumped into it a few times. Folk psychology, and whenever you're talking about ideas, beliefs, images in our minds, it gets called folk psychology, and he's not prepared to talk about it. This, I think, reflects a shortcoming in the theory that we're listening to, that there wouldn't be a position on folk psychology, namely, what are ideas, what are concepts, strikes me as a gross shortcoming. The reason, in my opinion, it's called folk psychology is precisely because it appears like the things we're talking about are non-physical. Therefore, if you're talking about non-physical things, you must be talking about some folksy superstitious theory that isn't scientific because everybody knows that all existent things are spatiotemporally existing. If you say otherwise, you're some kind of a religious or spiritual nut job that's talking about folk psychology. The more I dive into this, actually, I find it shocking just how dismissive a lot of intellectuals are. I'm not claiming this is Dr. Azuni, I actually found him quite reasonable, but so many intellectuals are skatingly dismissive of folk psychology. That is, if I were to say something like, ideas exist and they drive your behavior. Beliefs exist and they're the most important thing in your life. Folks, these are just folk talk here. What is a belief? Well, that's just this word that the simple bumpkin views to talk about some mental phenomena that's happening, but everybody knows ideas don't really exist because that would imply non-physical existence. The whole theoretical power of positing the existence of ideas and beliefs is overwhelming. I mean, to have a worldview in which ideas don't exist is to have a grossly stunted worldview. And yet that, when you push people who investigate this area and are a part of the orthodoxy, they don't like the idea that ideas exist or beliefs exist or beliefs drive people's behavior. My claim, maybe this is because I'm a folksy bumpkin myself, my claim is if you actually investigate folk psychological theories about what people report their mental goings on to be, well, actually that gives you a incredible theory about how the world and how the mind works. I think there's much more theoretical power in people describing their introspective experiences than there are these many times dogmatic scientists and thinkers who assume off the get-go that all existing things must be physical. I think that stunts their explanatory power of their theories. What I'm focusing on specifically here is that when you talk about a public language, which we do, and we talk about English, and we talk about the grammar of English and the meanings of words that are held in common, and we talk about, if we talk about the practices that we engage in where we defer to others sometimes on the meaning of a word, I had this tendency to think of a tomato as a vegetable, but in point of fact I'm wrong and it's a fruit, right? We're deferring to certain botanical, I'm not going to say that right, experts. That object does not exist is what I want to say. So when the sentence though, that object does not exist, makes me think, well then it isn't an object. It isn't an object, but we experience it as an object and we talk about it and we rely on it and we communicate with one another. And so we have certain experiences which we indispensable have to describe a certain way, but if I were to step back and do linguistic theory about this kind of public object or pragmatics or whatever, my theory would talk about public objects that would quantify over them just as if I were writing an essay on a novel of Dickens, I would talk about the characters and quantify over them. And in both cases those things don't exist even though I say the sentences will be true. And I mean that's the one theory that just strikes me as unnecessarily convoluted and it still doesn't solve the problems that I want to see solved. Why don't we just say tomato is a word that we use to describe a concept in our mind. That concept may or may not have an external referent in the physical world. If in our conception of tomato we have, you know, tomatoes are living creatures that like to go to amusement parks on the weekend and talk with one another, that concept exists, but it does not correspond to anything outside of our conception. It does not have a external referent. But if we think of a tomato as some assortment of particles that once assorted as the properties of being red, being slightly squishy, having seeds on the inside, being farmed by lots of people, being a staple in hamburgers, have to have tomato, if that's what I mean by the concept in my head, then that does have an external referent in the world. Were I never to exist and no minds were to ever exist, then the concept of tomato wouldn't exist. The taxonomic distinction of tomato would have no type of existence. But to the extent that tomato references external phenomena in the world, bits of matter arranged in particular ways, then that phenomena would still be there our minds. To me, I've run this theory by lots of people, both in the interviews and not in the interviews, haven't heard a good objection to that. Moving from fictional characters, do you also have the same perspective on something like government? Does government exist? Governments, countries, yeah, I have not yet started to write about social ontology. I'm approaching it. I'm intending to write about it very shortly. But the answer is yes. The situation is a little more complicated because there's a sense in which we, it's only a sense though, it's not absolute, in which we take countries or think of them at times as composed of people or constituting a territory. Again, it turns out it's a very complicated notion. In fact, just a notion of a city like London is very complicated. This is the sort of thing that Chomsky has pointed out, and that it's playing a multiplicity of ontological roles and it's very shifty. But in point of fact, and so when you analyze what we would be dealing with here, there's going to be the only way to put it now, just informally, is that there are aspects of it that exist and aspects of it that do not. This again strikes me as a bit unnecessary the way that I would put it. I don't find it difficult to say that government is a concept in our head. We have all kinds of abstractions that are unique to the individual. What I mean by government is not what you might mean by government, but those concepts should at any point be able to be brought back to their concrete reference and reality. This is actually one of the errors that people make, is they talk about government as a floating abstraction. That is some independently existing thing in the world separate from individual people and their behavior. Usually if I'm talking about government, I'm talking about the actions of actual individuals, or I'm talking about rules of the game. What are rules of the game? Well, I think they can be found in people's minds. Laws, for example, I think ultimately are beliefs. They're commonly held beliefs that restrict individuals' behaviors. At any point, you should be able to draw your abstractions back into grounded in reality. But to say some parts exist, some parts don't exist, I prefer the language of saying that the concept of government exists, some parts of my concept refer to independently existing things, and some parts of my concept surely don't refer. I'm sure part of my conception doesn't actually refer to parts in reality. I'm sure I don't have a perfect conception of government, but I think it's more philosophically precise to say that sometimes our concepts refer or don't refer versus saying exist or doesn't exist. Okay, so what I'd like to do is present to you something that I want you to tell me why I'm wrong, because I don't like the idea of Platonism, and I don't like the idea, well I like the idea of Dominoism, but I don't like sentences like we can say true things about non-existent. Right, well that's a misleading way of putting it. The right way to put it is that we have sentences that are true with terms in them that don't refer. Okay, so that is a much more precise way of putting it. Well it's not that the other way is imprecise, it's that the other way invites a position which philosophers have adopted that, well there are two kinds of objects. There are ones that exist and ones that don't, or there are ones that have being and ones that don't, or maybe then none of them have being, but then they are in some sense or have properties, even though they don't exist and don't have being. And I don't want to say any of this. All of this to me is crazy metaphysics. Okay, so, but I think there's another option here. Okay. This is my own position. All right. That mental objects have a mind dependent existence. So when we're talking about something like government or we're talking about something like Pegasus, Pegasus exists, but what I mean by that word is a mental unit in my mind. Don't want to say that. Okay, so why is that, why don't you like that? Why you don't want to say that is that sounds like what's called a use mention error. And so it goes something like this. Let's start with the keys on my desk over here. Okay. I certainly have a concept of them. I have an idea of them. And that's a mental entity and that's probably dependent on my mind in the sense that you're describing, although you know, I'm going to have problems with that. But let's not worry about that because that's not important. The crucial thing is that we want to distinguish the keys, the physical keys from the mental entity. So there's at least two things that we're talking about here. And when I say the keys exist, or the keys are heavy, or any other number of things about the keys, I am not talking about the mental entity. The mental entity has a different set of properties. So here's how I respond to that. Right. And so I want to say with Pegasus, you've got the mental entity, but you don't have the Pegasus. So that's the difference between the keys and Pegasus. Okay, so that's a position that actually I think Timothy Williamson said as well as a use-mentionaire. But here's my response. What do you think about something like this? That there are different types of existence. So you have a spatial existence. Yeah. The keys have the keys. Keys have spatial existence. Sure. And fictional objects have fictional existence. Or what I would say is they have a conceptual existence. They have a mental existence that is not spatially located. There are philosophers who at least sound like this. As I said, you'll find a philosopher for any position because logical space, surprisingly, logical space is as rare and expensive as apartments in Manhattan, for whatever reason. So you'll find every space you'll find some philosopher. I don't, I'm a person who thinks, and now I'm going to try to try to out linguistic evidence for this, that that's not how the word word exists works. Exists does not have many meanings. Exists does not have many uses. It has, it is not ambiguous. Now, well, from my perspective, that's not really a response. He's just saying, well, okay, yep, that that's a position that some philosophers have. I don't have that position because I think existence has one type of meaning. Well, first of all, I disagree that existence has one type of meaning. I think very few words have one type of meaning. And I very strongly don't use the term exist to reference only spatiotemporally existing phenomena. But second of all, okay, well, so I guess it's not a use mention error. This is the, this is the same resolution I wanted to bring up with. And I was talking to Dr. Williamson about it. This seems to me this position strikes me as perfectly logically consistent, explanatory of all phenomena makes a nice distinction between physical existence, non physical existence, mind dependent versus non mind dependent. I can explain fictional characters fine. I can explain concepts fine. I've yet to bump into the theory to the phenomena that I can't explain perfectly consistently well without much difficulty within this way of thinking about the world. There are multiple types of existence, spatial non spatial. So at the very least, I'm glad to see that he recognizes, okay, well, in this circumstance, not a use mention error at all. Recall the example I gave to you a little earlier where I said, there are cartoon characters and animators who resemble one another. One use of there are covering both two different kinds. And you can also say the same thing with exist. Yes, I totally agree. But, but what I would say is all that's reflective of is an imprecision of language that comes up in circumstances like this. So the way we clear that up is not by saying, oh, exist is intrinsically ambiguous. We just say, oh, well, we have to specify what we mean by the term. So if I say something like, you know, Harry Potter has square glasses, that's a false sentence. I could meaningfully say, no, that's false Harry Potter has round glasses. What I mean by Harry Potter seems like a very clear concept. It's some kind of a mental unit that I can describe in various true or false ways. Other people might share that concept in their own minds. They can, there's going to be this overlap between your concepts and my concepts. But we don't have to say Harry Potter doesn't exist. What I'd say is Harry Potter, that term has no spatial referent. That term is just a pure conceptual. Look, this is a view. This is a view. Okay. And you can even inoculate the view against the linguistic evidence. You don't have to call language imprecise, which seems mean. You can say, well, we're going to revise the language or regiment it. We're going to allow exist to work this way. Your metaphysics in a way is going to drive your revisions in language. That can happen. This is one of the reasons I said earlier. This is one of my favorite conversations I've had because he gets it. He's totally aware of these arguments. And he can say things like, yep, this is a coherent position what you're talking about. We know you've carved out a niche here. That is actually coherent. And he and I are both in agreement that we are not Platonist. He's even more strongly averse to Platonism that I think I would be because he's going even more extreme than I am in my own metaphysics. But it's nice to be able to say, okay, yes, your position is internally coherent, but I disagree with it for these reasons. I think I would say the same thing for the most part with his position that I don't think I've found any kind of logical contradiction here. It just strikes me as a very odd use of language. And it seems like a lot of our disagreement is about the use of language and its relationship with the world. I'm going the other way. I'm going to say, you know what, I can get by without messing with existence. Now, parentheses, I have other arguments about this. I have trouble understanding different notions of existence. To me, what you're describing is something that exists in the same way, but has different properties. It's mental or it's in space and time. And so I'm saying, you know, that's actually your position. Your position is actually just good old fashioned. You believe in different kinds of objects. Some of them are mental, some of them are, and some of them are numbers. And you're labeling it. Now, I want to, I, in my back pocket, I haven't mentioned this, I have a criterion for what exists, which is not is in space time, but which would sound like it would just blatantly beg the question against you. I have a position which is something like, if something exists, it's mind and language independent. We have to, we don't get to dictate its properties. It gets to tell us what its properties are and we have to find out. So you reject the category of fiction all mind, you say mind dependent existent is those things. Yeah, that's not, there is no such thing as a mind dependent thing, except in the following sense. And this is why I wasn't ruling out mental entities necessarily. Look, I make a chair. The chair is in a certain sense carpenter dependent. That is to say the chair would not have existed unless the carpenter would have brought it into existence. I don't think that makes its existence dependent in any way, except causally, in the same way, if there was no big bang, there would be no me. This is a pretty clear differentiation of our positions that he's saying, okay, well, mine, there might be something that is mind dependent in the sense that a mind is brought it about, but not that their existence is dependent on a mind. And my position is, yes, in a very explicit extreme way, lots of phenomena have a mind dependent existence, meaning they definitely exist when they are being conceived. When they exist in somebody's mind. And they definitely do not exist when they're not being conceived. So for example, my sensory experiences, sensory experiences are something sensory experiences exist. But they don't exist when they aren't being experienced, they only exist when they are being experienced. That's something like a mind dependent phenomena. I think there's quite a lot of mind dependent phenomena out there. He's kind of ruling that out as a whole category of thing, just straight off the get go. In that way, I can see mental events under a different description, perhaps, as brain episodes of a brain, brain neurons, fire, blah, blah, blah, that's an episode. And it may be, although I'm not positive, this will ever work out. I think it might not, that mental, the folk talk about ideas and in prayer, we'll all turn into episodic descriptions of episodes. And then that depends on what episodes are. So that would be the way I go. Now, when it comes to, therefore, fictional entities, again, I want to say what makes the Potter claims true or false is the movie and storytelling discourses that have been created. And then do these sentences describe things correctly or not that are taking place in them? Not do they describe Harry Potter correctly, because there is no Harry Potter, but do they correspond in the right way to the sentences which occur in the Harry Potter stories? That's the story I'm going to tell. So what I'm saying is that at the end of the day, I think you can tell your story, I can tell my story. Where I would want to apply pressure against you in argument would be with my criterion. Okay. All right. So that's kind of his position. You know, he tells his story, I tell mine. And then for the sake of this interview breakdown, this is the last segment that I want to analyze right here. Okay. So when you are thinking about creativity, human creation, because I have this wiggle room in my metaphysics for mind dependent things, I would say something like, you know, I can actually conceive of, let's say, a song that hasn't been written or a song that's in my head. Sure. And it's never been fully there, but I can almost in a sense hear it. Right. I can say all those things with a language of like, yeah, well, in some sense, that song exists. That's what I'm referencing. That's what I'm super fix, so pseudo hearing. But it's existence doesn't have any spatial referent yet. How do you think about, you know, creative objects? Yeah, creative objects, it's going to depend on the object. Let's let's assume that an object is a certain the objects we're talking about here, there are such objects are are are time bounded, they come into existence at a certain point, they go out of existence at a certain point. And so, and let's say these are the things we create. This is a very simple toy model, because I think there are things we create that don't exist in a certain sense. Again, I'm speaking in this terrible way. But I can anticipate. And there are things we say, like, you know, the house I am going to build is one I can barely afford. Okay. And that's a statement about a future house. Okay, I am able to refer to there are real questions about am I actually referring to it, you know, because it exists in the future, let's say it really does exist. And then I maybe I'm able to refer to something in the future. At the present moment, that would be an actual object that I was referring to it, maybe the house never comes into being in that case, I'm not referring to something. Okay, but nevertheless, what I'm saying is true. Because one of the reasons the house never got built was because I couldn't afford it. Right? So what I'm going to do in these cases, and you know, if you think about the creation of fictional characters, which I treat as creation, those are the creation of things that don't exist. And what we're going to describe instead, if we say, well, what did the person create metaphysically? Well, it depends if it's a story, it's a bunch of sentences or it's ink on paper that's interpreted or whatever. And then it's something that we allow to accrue over time the way we would treat it. In other cases, we're just going to talk about a practice that we can carry on of a certain sort of way of talking. And that's what we're actually creating when we're creating these, okay, these objects. I do not think it's the case that writers ultimately metaphysically are creating ink on paper. I think that in fact completely misses the point of what these types of creations are. Stories are mental things going on in our head. When we talk about a story, we talk about a song, we talk about a painting, we're not really talking about ink on paper, paint on canvas, some squiggles on some bars, we're talking about the mental goings on to understand an incredible song as only sound waves and not the mental phenomena that happens once the sound waves are experienced, I think is to misunderstand what a song is, just like I think it's a misunderstanding of what a story is to ultimately try to metaphysically say it's actually ink on paper or ways of talking. But again, this is kind of coming from metaphysical position. I always want to reduce my ontology and he wants to reduce his ontology even more than mine but I think at the expense of a really powerful way of talking about the phenomena we experience human life I think is completely wrapped up and driven by all of these mental goings on. I think if you were to talk to any artist or any writer, they would have a very difficult time saying that fundamentally all they're doing is arranging ink on a piece of paper. And I don't think that's what they're doing. I think one way of bringing their creation into existence and into the minds of other people is by rearranging inked in a particular way. But it's so that that rearranged ink will elicit the concept in the mind of the reader. That's the whole point of the matter. But I think you guys get it. I won't beat a dead horse. This is the really only about half of the conversation. The other half we were talking about philosophy and metaphysics of mathematics which is also interesting but it's going to be a pretty hard change from the tone of this breakdown. So I want to end it here and someday hopefully I'll get around to breaking down the second part of our conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed this analysis. I think I love this conversation with Dr. Razuni. It's great to run into somebody that has even more extreme pare down metaphysical views than I do and somebody that has a clear grasp of language. I really appreciated a lot of his linguistic precision and his attempt and capacity to follow along and really make for a fantastic conversation. So what do you guys think? Do you think mental objects exist? Do you think there's such a thing as a mind dependent existence? When you think about the story of Harry Potter, fundamentally are you talking about words on paper? Are you talking about a film that's played in your head, if you will, and played in the heads of other people? If I were to say Pegasus is a blue walrus, I'm saying something false. In order for something to be true or false, does that imply some type of metaphysical existence and if so, what type of metaphysical existence? That's my analysis. If you like these breakdowns, you like the episodes, do make sure to leave a comment, subscribe. You can support the show at patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. Also feel free to shoot me an email about your thoughts about any of the episodes. I've run these metaphysical ideas by many people on my travels, even in lots of conversations, even if I'm just talking about mathematics. I think it fares pretty well, so I want to keep putting it to the test. That's all for today, guys. Have an excellent week.