Talking About Nothing: Numbers, Hallucinations and Fictions
Jody Azzouni
Abstract
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (with demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized nonexistent objects to which our scientific theories more conveniently apply. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items—especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences—are indispensable. Scientific and ordinary languages allow us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false) such as “Pegasus was b ... More
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (with demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized nonexistent objects to which our scientific theories more conveniently apply. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items—especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences—are indispensable. Scientific and ordinary languages allow us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false) such as “Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse,” or “That elf I’m now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes.” Standard contemporary metaphysical views and standard contemporary philosophical semantic analyses of singular idioms have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). This book reconfigures metaphysics and semantics in a radical way to allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial assumption that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them.
Keywords:
demonstratives,
direct reference,
singular idioms,
nonexistence,
truth,
literary fiction,
hallucination,
indispensability,
ontological commitment,
scientific fictions
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199738946 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199738946.001.0001 |
