mhc

Thanks for the responses.
What I think I am getting at is the notion: nothing can not exist.
Of course when we refer to it ( i.e."nothing") we confirm its existence as something-be it only a vague conception or mental image or even just a possibility. It is false then to say it does not or can not exist.
"X does not exist" is clearly a contradiction no matter what X might be. Even if we say that we don't or can't know what X might be, we have defined it to some degree as at least the set of ? outside the set of existent things. At that time it exists as some conception.

Witt- you say it seems imperative that we are able to refer to the class of possibly non-existant things. Is that logically imperative, or just expedient?

I'm very confused about this. Since "void" used as a noun refers to a *thing* (material or otherwise) does it follow that Void per se is a thing?

mhc

OR-

X cannot be an "object of thought" without being some kind of thing.

Yes?

xorbie

I believe that there would have to be an infinite number of things that do not exist. Even if you allow in the definition of existence to be anything that humans have a notion of (i.e. God, Thor, pink unicorns and vampires all "exist"), there are still things that no human has ever though of. Let's put it this way. Before the first human ever thought of the idea of a pink unicorn, did pink unicorns exist (assume that they do not physically exist anywhere)? The answer to this is clearly no. Thus, there must be several things now that nobody has yet thought of and that thus don't exist. I see no reason to assume that this set of things is infinite. Moreover, I don't see how a 3 sided square can ever exist because we don't even have a "vague notion" of what the hell that might be.

phil

Easy! A three sided square is a triangle!

I'm serious. Think about it. 'Square' is a man made term that stands for a polygon with four equal line segments. Its angles add up to 360 degrees.

Therefore, there is no such thing as a three sided square, but the closest thing would be an equilateral triangle.

Anything else that doesn't fit the definition of a square is not what we call a 'square.' For example, rhombus, parallelogram, triangle, rectangle etc...

-phil

mhc

I wasn't very careful. I should have said that the statement
"X does not exist as anything" is always a contradiction, because of course it must exist as something in order for us to be able to state that it does not exist.
A three-sided square is contradictory also. Yet, even though we might not be able to conjure a mental image of it, it has some degree of existence as a conceptual conundrum - enough for us to know some basic things about it, such as its impossibility of existing as a material object.

There must have been a time when pink unicorns (and just about everything we know) did not exist as anything, but that retrospective is irrelevant to the fact that we can't say that X has no existence at all, since X exists as a member of the set of non-existent things.

Maybe the problem is just in the incompleteness if the statement. "X does not exist" needs to be qualified. Pink unicorns as animals do not exist, or, pink unicorns do not exist as animals.
However " pink unicorns do not exist" is obviously false. Philosophers have been throwing around pink unicorns and square circles for ages, and there is a real thing (though not an animal or shape) they refer to, it's not just a void.

Mexicola

How would one be entitled to claim that knowing nothing of X constitutes knowledge of it? Surely if one has no knowledge of X one doesn't even know if X exists or not. Is P3 then relevant to P1 and P2?
You need to ask "who is judging this statement to be 'knowledge'??" In the right context "I know nothing of X" could constitute knowledge of X, for example of how to use the term correctly. But one can't judge this to be knowledge in isolation.

mhc

Hi Mexicola,



There is no intended relevance between the 3 props. They are just parts of questions that I am trying to get a handle on.

It's not knowing nothing of it that I question, but rather the claim that one knows nothing of it.

Isn't it true that a person's or people's not knowing of a thing is something true about that thing?
If you discovered a hither-to-unknown island, wouldn't it be true about that island that no one else knows about it (if indeed no one did)?
It's clearly true about the knowledge of others: (They know nothing of this island). Isn't it also true of the island? (This island is unknown to the rest of the world.) The predicate clearly says something true about the subject. And to make a true statement about something, I think, constitutes knowledge of that same thing.
So if someone were to ask my opinion of ishkabibble, and I were to say I know nothing of ishkabibble, my statement would be at best incomplete. More complete would be:"I know nothing of it, beyond the fact that there seems to something called ishkabibble, of which you inquire." This shows that I already know something of it, such as its name, and the fact I am unacquainted with it.

It seems true, then, that we cannot know what it is that we don't know. Our knowledge of a thing usually accumulates, and we go from knowing nothing but its name or its appearance to knowing a lot more about it.
THere is a fundamental difference between nothing and something, though. And the difference between nothing and something is more essential than the difference between something and something more. (There's a wild assertion!)

xorbie

Let me get this straight. Are you trying to ask if there are things that do not exist (which there are, see my last post), or if the statement "I know nothing of X" can ever be true? Or is it "X does not exist as anything" is always contradiction? Well I'll field the latter two here now.

The statement "I know nothing of X" can in fact be true. For instance "I know nothing about xjiyfgh" (as applied to me). I think that what you are doing in your post is playing semantics with it, and it has some air of sophistry, or at least seems to. If I make the claim that "I know nothing about xjiyfgh," this seems totally true of it. I don't know whether this object exists, I don't know what it might be, I don't even know what it's name is. This last one is important, and is true. Let me use an example to demonstrate this. Let's say someone was walking around, talking about zoids. He kept saying how he had a nice zoid, citing statistics about zoids, mainting that his zoid was very expensive and so on. It would seem he knows a lot about said zoids. Then one day he points to a house and says "That's one nice zoid." Ahah! It seems he knows a lot about zoids, but NOT that the correct name for a "zoid" is in fact a house. Thus, you can call an object something and still not know it's name. You might argue that in some sense you still know this object's name because you link it with some word in your own head (simply the wrong one). However, this does not work with the xjiyfgh, because I am not linking that label with any actual object, concept or anything at all. Thus, I really do know NOTHING about xjiyfgh.

Now with regards to "X does not exist as anything" I am wary of disagreeing. Assuming that "exists" includes people have concepts of X, then I think I agree with you. In this case, I could not use an object which I literally know nothing about, because I might be wrong that it does not exist as anything. I could of course not make both claims. And the second I know one thing at all about X, it exists as something, no matter how vague, in my head.

Just keep in mind that these two sentences are not the same, and it is clear that they in fact cannot even both be true.

mhc

Xorbie-
An air of sophistry? Perhaps that's your opinion, but I promise there is no trick involved. Just honest questioning.
You may not know its common name, but you must know, at least generally, that to which you refer, no matter what you choose to call it. To say you know nothing of xjiyfgh is to admit that much knowledge of it, (not to mention that you apparently know how to spell it).

Would you agree that to exist is to exist *as something*? That in order for us to say that anything has existence, it must have instantiation somehow?
If to exist as something is essential to existence generally, then what is the difference between saying "X does not exist", and "X does not exist as anything"?
And if you concur, then how can you be certain that there are things which do not exist, and also agree with the contradiction within the statement "X does not exist as anything"?

xorbie

I agree, and I did not say that "x does not exist" is not a contradiction. I said that the statement "some things do not exist" is not a contradiction and I think it is actually true.

No, I don't think you understand. I have NO IDEA what I am refering to, or if I am referring to anything at all. Let us try again. I am not sure I am spelling it correctly or if xjiyfgh even exists. I don't know it if is a word. I don't know if I know what it is. I don't know ANYTHING about xjiyfgh. This is not like saying "I don't know anything about basketball." I actually don't know anything about xjiyfgh. I don't know it if has a common name, or a name at all. I don't know if it exists. (I feel the need to repeat myself)