Re: BHA: absence

[Ruth Groff <rgroff@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Louis,

Thanks once again for such a careful commentary.  A few responses:

You wrote:
I am not sure you are right in that understanding...The things that are said
to emerge are powers, not the products of the exercise of powers.  Thoughts
and ideas are the products of the exercise of a power that has already
emerged.  If I am right, it is a category mistake to impute the existence,
much less the
non-existence, of a thought or idea to a base from which it emerges.

This seems right.  Thanks for clearing that up.


>These real non-existents are not supposed to depend on whether you think
about >them or not, except for the special case of absent thoughts.  Maybe I
am >misreading you, and you are just focusing on conceptual absences in
particular.
Yes, I realize that not all of the entities which are absent and/or
non-existent are concepts.  I *was* just focusing on conceptual absences in
particular.

>I surmise that you see a problem in construing reality as comprising both
>existence and non-existence, because the positive side comprises unanalyzed
>givens and lets in a residual positivism.  So even the priority of the
>negative over the positive is not enough.  Something like that?

Actually no.  I am genuinely open to the idea that my feeling about this
(and feeling is the right word, as it's hardly worked out) is incorrect, but
it's more like: granting ontological status not just to non-existent
entities (bad enough) but to *the fact of their being non-existent*,
undermines the force of their negativity.  Maybe I just can't separate out
the notion of ontological status from the idea of existence, or being.
Anyway, its an analogous problem to the one that I had with truth being an
ontological category.  Both "truth" and "absence" seem to me to be
epistemological categories.


>Here is my suggestion for nomenclature.  Consider some examples.  Let's say
>Sally is in the cafe and Pierre is not. Let's consider Socrates and Santa
>as well, giving us the following four statements:
>
>-Sally is real, exists, and is present.
>-Pierre is real and exists, but he is absent.
>-Socrates is real, but he does not exist and therefore cannot be present.
>-Santa is not real, does not exist and therefore cannot be present.


Okay.  And we'll assume that "to be" is equivalent to "exists"?
But first of all, on what grounds are we saying that Socrates *IS* real, as
opposed to *WAS* real?  Is it just that if you ever "existed" (or, to be
precise, if the referent of the concept ever existed), then you get to keep
being "real", even after you don't exist anymore?  If not, and it's just
that the idea of Socrates continues to have causal efficacy (presumably
because he, the man, did once exist), then I think you have to say that
Santa is real too.  I mean, either reality is conferred by existence or it
isn't.  No?

Second, there are two levels of abstraction.  Using your nomenclature, the
first is the question of whether non-existent entities themselves have
ontological standing (and, as above, perhaps I need some clarification about
what it means to having ontological standing); the second is whether
non-existence in and of itself has what I am calling ontological standing.
I'm not convinced yet of either.

I think I would be inclined to say something like "The idea, or memory, of
Socrates is as real as any other concept, but Socrates himself is no longer
real," followed by "The idea that, because he's dead, Socrates is absent,
non-existent and unreal is itself as present, existent and real as any other
idea that I may have, but "absence", "non-existence" and "unreality" in and
of themselves have no special ontological status different from that of any
other idea.

Whew.  I guess I'm not too convinceable on this, huh?

R.



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