I think what it tells us about their being is that they occur in a certain mode of our being -- call it an abstract or linguistic mode, of which I would include mathematics and music. Quantities and geometric shapes are human phenomena. This is a Kantian move, really, but with the "subject" and "time" as interpreted differently. — Xtrix

That’s helpful for explaining what you’ve been trying to get at. There’s more to do, but I could definitely see preferring to start here.

So mathematical objects (expressions, theorems, etc.) are not ‘timeless’ but are perfectly repeatable, either because they’re unbound by the context of their use, or because they’re meaningless. At least the idea of repetition gets time in there, so I’ll think that over.

BTW: turn off autocorrect or proofread your posts.

asking how long it takes for a number to be a number is meaningless — Xtrix

Yes, well, that’s the point of saying that mathematics is ‘timeless’, but you and @Joshs keep wanting to say something else, only I don’t know what it is.

I can see the argument that mathematical objects are present-at-hand, and connecting that to a conception of permanence and so forth. I don’t happen to know if that’s how Heidegger talks about them, but it’s what I would expect.

Numbers -- and words -- are products of the human mind, of the human being. — Xtrix

And? What does their being the products of Dasein tell us about their being?

Mathematical objects are locked in a permanent now because we have made them so. They cannot be what we intend them to be unless they are ‘timeless’ in this way. Is there some reason we cannot so intend?

By hand, it might take you a minute or two to work out that 357 x 68 = 24,276. A calculator or computer will do it faster, but still take a measurable amount of time. But how long does it take 357 x 68 to be 24,276?



I think I would be okay with saying that time in mathematics is truncated to an eternal and unchanging now, and that this is what people mean when they say mathematics is ‘timeless’; and indeed the very idea of ‘now’ derives from a certain way of conceiving time, certainly.

But that’s addressing the content of mathematics — which I have no objection to, even in this somewhat oblique, conceptual way — rather than arguing that whatever is true of mathematicians is true of mathematics. Pierre de Fermat was French but his theorem was not. Andrew Wiles, unlike Fermat, continues to breathe every day, but his proof of Fermat’s theorem has never drawn a breath.

Mathematics is a human activity. Humans do indeed exist “in” time (or, better, “as” time). When we think in symbols, we’re thinking in a certain moment in time.

Mathematics does indeed presuppose time. — Xtrix

This is like arguing that mathematics presupposes oxygen.

Hence we have definitions of "is" (existence, being) which are not dependent on time. — Banno

There’s another way to look at this though: whatever understanding of being is implicit in logic (classical logic, Frege’s logic) and mathematics is an understanding appropriate to unchanging, timeless — i.e., eternal — entities. Whatever sort of being we have, or anything else we’re familiar with has, it’s not like that.

Nor does formal logic presume that individuals persist over time. — Banno

It's timeless, because it was designed for mathematics. That's why Frege's logic is missing modality too.

I would have said rather that he showed there was no question here - that the notion of being was not the sort of thing that might be subject to further analysis, but just the sort of thing that has to be taken as granted — Banno

It's hard to know what to say here.

Wittgenstein doesn't always and unconditionally give in to the temptation to say "here my spade is turned". He dissects many things other people are happy to take for granted. And some of what he says looks enough like an explanation that people take him to be advancing some doctrine or another, despite his protests to the contrary.

He spends twenty years or so on the new project, trying over and over again to explain why there's nothing much to say, or trying not to explain it but just show that it is so. It is possible that something was going wrong there, that he was himself in a fly bottle he could not find the way out of. And the result is that those few remaining philosophers who care about Wittgenstein argue endlessly over what he meant. Why is that?

Wittgenstein and Heidegger are, in part anyway, barking up related trees: what it means to be in an interpreted and interpretable world. (Anscombe and Searle, I can't speak to.) And Wittgenstein's story is precisely that classical logic lacks the resources needed for such an account. (He tried.)

what is taken as granted in our conversation — Banno

That's not a terrible place to start, although you might have said in our lives rather than our conversations.

I think the question is, can you give an account of what "taking as granted" is? How does it work? How is it possible?

Logic, by design, has nothing to say here: existence and truth are taken as primitives, and are *prior* to logical operations. (Originally Frege included "judgment" as well.) You can continue to add on formalisms like model theory, but to specify a domain of discourse, you'll need a "membership" primitive as well. (You'll also need membership to treat predicates extensionally.)

Logic, like math, gets along fine without defining its primitives -- that's rather the point -- but that's not to say we do not in fact bring to logic and to math an understanding, some kind of understanding from somewhere, of the meaning of those primitives, or that there's no reason to give them some thought.

Give me a paper to read. — Banno

Past the Linguistic Turn?

I think this may have been his inaugural address on becoming Wykeham Professor of Logic.

I haven't read Grice, is his work worth exploring? — Janus

Grice fits in this little sub-discussion because he was unwilling to renounce his theoretical ambitions, so you get a very different version of some of what you find in the late Wittgenstein, some things that look enough like full-fledged theories in fact that they’ve been taken up variously in linguistics.

A quick point and my lunch break is done.

The best scientific theory tells you not just that earth in fact goes around the sun, but why it looks like the sun goes around the earth. That one might be straightforward, but not every case is.

What proof — Banno

I don't have a text on front of me, but from context I thought he was talking about 'proof of the external world', that sort of thing.

And his response is almost exactly Wittgenstein's.

Srap Tasmaner was looking for something more in the analytic tradition — Banno

?

Sorry, I thought both passages were clear enough.

The word that jumped out at me in the first passage was "decision". I remember reading this sort of thing as a young man and deciding immediately, as young men do, that I was an existentialist. This sense that your very existence is something you have to decide what to do with, and to understand what it means to have the kind of existence that needs to make those kinds of decisions -- that was thrilling stuff. A whole generation read Heidegger as helping them frame exactly the question "How should I live?" and take some steps towards answering it. The translation I'm quoting is by an existentialist theologian.

I'm not sure there's much to say about the second bit. As I just noted above, you can see the hermeneutic approach here: why our understanding is muddled is also interesting and part of what needs explaining.

Does that help at all?

I would say the "method" of philosophy is really phenomenology — Xtrix

One thing I really like is Heidegger's hermeneutic approach: you start from the asking of whatever question, and you don't skip right over how the question is asked, and why, and by whom, and what they think they're up to, but start there, with that vague understanding. And it's fascinating to see how he treats this not just as methodology but as part of the essential structure of the world: we ask vague questions about things we kinda already understand because some of what we understand or could understand is hidden, and that's part of what we investigate too.

Wittgenstein never quite seems to manage that unifying of method and subject matter, so to speak. The explanation of why, say, we're misled by language never really comes, and is never really brought into focus. Here we're misled or tempted or whatever, he'll say, and that's it. But his talk of reminding us of what we already understand could obviously support the hermeneutic approach.

My favourite amongst these is "What ought I do?". — Banno

Furthermore, in each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine. That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as it ownmost possibility. In each case, Dasein is its possibility, and it ‘has’ this possibility, but not just as a property that something present-at-hand would. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, choose itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or it can only ‘seem’ to do so. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic — that, something of its own — can it have lost itself and not yet won itself. — H 42-43, M&R

It’s not like it’s an accident that Being and Time birthed existentialism.

One more note on philosophy as clarification.

We do not know what Being means. But even if we ask, ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague understanding of the meaning of Being is still a fact.

However much this understanding of Being (an understanding which is already available to us) may fluctuate and grow dim, and border on mere acquaintance with a word, its very indefiniteness is a positive phenomenon which needs to be clarified. An investigation of the meaning of Being cannot be expected to give this clarification at the outset. If we are to obtain the clue we need for Interpreting this average understanding of Being, we must first develop the concept of Being. — H 5-6, M&R

So Heidegger’s your guy on both counts.

they place one thing at the centre of philosophical discourse before the discourse begins — Banno

Except that’s exactly what Heidegger did not do. He comes to phenomenological ontology as his rethinking of Husserl’s phenomenology, and the argument he makes in the beginning of Being and Time is that this is the only methodology which can support a properly scientific philosophy.

Better to look at what philosophy is in terms of it's method - critical analysis that seeks clarification - than in terms of this or that content. — Banno

Which is exactly what Heidegger did, but without the parenthetical claim that we already know the right method for doing philosophy.

Not for nothing, but Timothy Williamson, in his role as defender of the project of philosophy as a theoretical science, has relentlessly attacked your claim that philosophy is just conceptual clarification.

Philosophy is about clarifying concepts rather than making up a neat story. The examination of existence in the tradition of Frege, Russell, and so on, the one that lead to modern formal logic, is a strong contender for providing at least part of such an account. — Banno

Well, that’s the thing. Whatever Being is, it’s not a Fregean concept, so philosophy done this way can — by choice, mind you — have nothing at all to say about Being.

I suppose in mischaracterizing your position as taking the being-as-category approach, what I was really trying to get at is this: if the analytic approach — Frege, Russell, Quine — yields nothing, are we just done? Is there nothing to do unless it’s done this way?

What I am doing is pointing out the problems with an account the treats apples as a category. — Banno

How so?

"Category" being roughly the same as "predicate". — Banno

As you like. What problems were you pointing out with the predicate "__ is an apple"?

Thank goodness! (I was genuinely puzzled by the ever so slightly hostile tone of your response. I like science!)

Insofar as I was indeed quibbling with the science, it was with the concept of representation, which, as I understand it, is still a bit of a thorny issue in cognitive science circles. I think it mostly no longer means what, say, Locke might have meant when he used the word, but the specifically philosophical tradition of indirect realism probably owes much more to the early moderns than it does to contemporary brain science, and that presents some particular challenges when talking about brain science, challenges I'm certainly not up to.

An imaginary apple might not be an apple, but it is an imaginary apple. It enters into our conversations as an imaginary apple, and we can at least try to put parts of this conversation into a first-order predicate format — Banno

But not by by saying something like "There is something that is an apple and is imaginary", surely.

What I am doing is pointing out the problems with an account the treats apples as a category. — Banno

How so?

second guessing the scientific community — frank

Maybe, a little, but that's not really my intention. What I'm trying to quibble with is not the research, and not the usefulness of whatever framework that research is carried out within, but the interpretation of the results.

Let me put it this way: quantum theory has been taken as scientific proof of various sorts of idealism or spiritual whatnot. Now we have the likes of Hoffman peddling the same thing, but now in the name of evolutionary psychology. Cognitive science (which, I feel obligated to say, is an interdisciplinary pursuit philosophy had been involved in from the beginning) is taken too often these days as a license to replace the 'vat' in 'brain in a vat' with 'skull' and leap to whatever philosophical conclusion you like about the external world. That's what I'm pushing back against

As I understand it -- and I'm not even an amateur cognitive scientist, so -- there is nothing in our brains that could conceivably correspond to what we take to be our "visual field". Must we *conclude* from that fact, that our visual field is an illusion in some sense?

Here's an analogy, possibly inapposite. Say you're looking at some code that implements a natural merge sort. You can see clearly enough in the code where data is *represented*; that's usually in variables, and they have names they acquire at baptism and everything. But where is the sorting? Is it symbolically represented somewhere? It is not. But it is there, everywhere, in the structure of the code. You would be wrong to conclude it's not there because you can't point at where it is represented symbolically.

I'm only suggesting that expectations about *how* the "external world" is represented, and what we mean when we say that, might lead one to misinterpret what we learn about how the brain works.

indirect realism and all the loss of confidence in our knowledge of the external world which that entails — frank

This part sounds pretty a priori to me.

the real apple is an apple that reveals itself as an apple — Heiko

I'm good with that, but I'm not sure it provides a 'way in' for someone starting from a 'categorical' understanding. If you think categorically, then you can still say, a real apple is an apple and an imaginary apple isn't; a real apple can be sweet or tart, crisp or mushy, but an imaginary apple can't be. And then you're just puzzled, because imagination is puzzling, and now you're thinking about that instead of being. The whole approach of taking a 'complete' description of an object, as a collection of properties, and just adding or subtracting instantiation, checking the 'exists' box or not -- it's not that that doesn't lead anywhere, but it leads you in the wrong direction.

You can instead, in a vaguely Wittgensteinian way, see that juggling apples and pretending to juggle apples are different language-games. It's not a difference that can be summed up by saying that the apples being juggled go in the 'exists' box or not. (Juggling invisible apples might look exactly the same as pretending to juggle apples, but it would be a lot harder. That's an example of 'subtracting a property'.)

1. What is the difference between a sweet, juicy, red apple and a sweet, juicy red apple that exists? The difference between a red apple and a green apple, or a sweet apple and a sour apple, is pretty clear. But explaining clearly what is added to an apple by existing...? — Banno

What is the difference between how I relate to a real apple, how I comport myself toward it, and how I relate to an imaginary apple?

I can, for instance, juggle three apples a little, but not for long and no more than three. Imaginary apples? I can juggle as many of those as I like for as long as I like.

Your way of approaching the question treats the being of the apple as a category, analogous to ‘green’ or ‘sweet’, and you quickly find there’s nothing much to say about ‘being’ as a category. But that’s not to say there’s no criterion of being here, because the criteria are implicit in our behavior.

Neuroscientists throw the blanket. Oddly, if you start by assuming direct realism, you'll have to conclude indirect realism. — frank

I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that if they were convinced that “indirect realism” was not “indirect irrealism” or some such thing.

We’re used to the sciences explaining how things work, where ‘work’ takes in both how some mechanism or process is structured and, in the case of biology, how that structure or process gets results, how it is successful. When you explain how fish breathe underwater — which is really cool and seems impossible, but not until you know a little about how breathing works — you don’t end up claiming that as a matter of fact they don’t.

Somehow we’ve gone from “Isn’t it amazing how your brain figures out what the objects in your environment are!” to “Your brain is just making shit up and lying to you about it.”

It is entirely possible that the problem is the preconceptions of cognitive scientists about what they would find, and did not. Imagine trying to explain how a gambler is successful when your working assumption is not that he has a sound grasp of probability, but that he can sometimes see the future. When it turns out he can’t ever see the future, you claim that his ability to place bets intelligently is an illusion, and he’s just lucky. Something like that.

Jesus, as if they weren’t hard enough on their own. On the other hand, something like this is becoming vaguely mainstream in post-analytic Anglo-American philosophy, isn’t it? Rorty and McDowell come to mind — but honestly I don’t know much really contemporary stuff.

What else would they be? Are they nothing? If they’re not nothing, then they’re “in” being along with everything else— clouds, feelings, sound, force, Bach’s fugues and strawberry candles. — Xtrix

I don’t have a dogmatic position on abstractions. My gut feeling is that we’re not talking about new objects, which are abstract, but new ways of relating to given concrete objects. Abstraction is when I count the forks in the drawer as all the same sort of thing regardless of their size, material, or handle design. ‘Fork’ is an abstraction over those concrete objects. I’m not motivated by some sort of ontological purity — but if abstraction is a way of relating to a concrete object, then my taking an object as a fork tells me something about how I relate to it.

An example I used to think about is doing trigonometry: you draw a ‘generic’ triangle on the blackboard by drawing an actual, non-generic triangle, but then interacting with it in a particular way, not relying on the actual, measurable length of its sides or interior angles — in some sense pretending that you could not just measure. (And maybe abstraction is always like this — we’ll say ‘ignoring’ all except the features you’ve chosen, but maybe ‘ignoring’ means ‘pretending not to notice’.) Here it’s almost as if the burden of abstraction is carried by a methodology, by careful control over what you may do with the picture and what you may not. That’s interesting.

But in this sense it is not about use, it is about what gains identity and so just "is" without spending any further thought. It is purely phenomenological. With further determinations we get into socially mediated concepts. — Heiko

But it sounds pretty empty. Does it make sense for me to be oriented toward something as something that ‘just is’? People aren’t cameras. I could see arguing for logical but not temporal priority here, and that perhaps this is what phenomenology uncovers. Something like, only by (‘first’ in the logical sense) being oriented toward something as a thing that is, can we be oriented toward it as anything. That looks more than a little like the Fregean conception of predication — if that’s a flower, it’s an existing thing that is a flower, and its existing is purely presupposed.

My impression, though, is that Heidegger thinks logical relations are themselves in need of grounding, rather than grounding what we might have to say about the being of things. I suppose that passes over your point about identity, but here identity seems to be a sort of raw demonstrative ‘that’.

Meaning is not an artifact or "after-fact" of language; meaning is also pre-linguistic and is what makes language possible in the first place. — Janus

For what it’s worth, Grice says something like this too with his thing about “natural meaning” and “non-natural meaning”. He claims a kind of continuity between “clouds mean rain” and “‘clouds’ means clouds”. (Heidegger slips ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ into that torturous discussion of phenomena and appearance, so we’re not far off.)

Interpreting is pretty much making us of.
— Banno

Did you mean "making use of"? — Janus

Fixed. — Banno

Might have been better the other way. I was all set to write a series of long (possibly tedious) posts about how we make ‘us’ of things through interpretation. ’Twas but a dream.

One answer would be that abstraction is what we resort to under uncertainty or dispute, but I don’t think that’s an argument that we don’t generally start from the terribly abstract and whittle down the possibilities until, for whatever reason, we settle at a somewhat lower level of abstraction.

I’m not sure what the argument against that would be, except that I can’t think of any reason for us to do that. It’s tidy in an analytic sense, but

• it’s slow and expensive
• it does not track how children learn language (at mid-level abstraction via exemplars) and natural languages are usable from the first steps of acquisition
• it fails to connect things to each other as we find them connected
• it misses our, possibly urgent, interest in what’s around us

All of that is about us, as creatures that find what we expect and want to find, what suits us, and adjust as we are surprised. We can give no meaning to ‘that thing’ and have no use for it, so it’s unlikely to be our first choice if we can guess ‘tree’ instead and change it ‘telephone pole’ later if we have to. But insofar as it’s ‘all about us’, that’s only because we are just the sort of creatures that can be sustained by the sorts of environment we find ourselves in, so we’re, in turn, all about where we live.

Not for nothing, but I’m reminded now that there’s a similar issue (similar to what I’m trying to understand about phenomena and appearances) raised by Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Sellars ends up arguing that we have to understand what it means for a tie to be blue in order to say that a tie looks blue.

It’s the same pattern: yes, the world is ‘already interpreted’ (one of the points Sellars is making) but it’s also a denial that we can say such interpretation is ‘mere appearances’, or the likes of ‘it looks blue to me’, all the way down. The tie, in all its being-blue, is given, but its givenness is not the mythical sort that is Sellars’s target.

Harry Potter is a thing. Harry Potter is a being. — Xtrix

Is he? It’s a phrase that occurs in some books and movies, and we understand how fiction works so we understand that we are to pretend it’s a story about a person called “Harry Potter”. He’s definitely not a person. I could see an argument for “Harry Potter” naming an aspect of those books and movies, an abstraction (and this is what we would mean by saying he’s a character in a book). But I’m iffy on whether abstractions are things, or just ways of seeing things.

But does Harry Potter "exist" -- if by "exist" we mean is a being? Yeah, of course. So do unicorns and Santa Claus. — Xtrix

But you have to say a lot more than, for instance, “Santa Claus exists — as an idea,” or something like that. An idea of what? Not of a person. Not only does there not happen to be the person stories call “Santa Claus”, there cannot be. Ditto for unicorns.

Do you have a criterion besides “__ is a noun phrase”?

Every discussion of existence turns into a discussion of Santa Claus and I think that’s just a mistake. I don’t see any point in talking about Santa Claus without a much better understanding of pretending than I have.

Seeming is what we do to things, isn' it? — Banno

Is it? How do we do that?

Say I see a fallen tree with a bit over a foot of a broken limb sticking straight up. If the branch had broken just so, and the light were just so, I might (as my ex-wife did) think I was seeing an owl perched on a fallen tree. Is that a seeming I impose? You could say that. But on what do I impose it? Is there not a primary phenomenon there of a fallen tree? This, I think Heidegger says, is what is manifest, what has been brought to light, what shows itself in itself.

Will you say that I have imposed ‘tree’ on a selection of my visual field? Or that I have ‘constructed’ the tree? If you want to say it is ‘already interpreted’ for me as a tree, I’m not really inclined to deny that, but I’d want to know a lot more about what ‘interpreted’ means here. There has to be the back and forth between what is given — not to my consciousness, but to me as a person — and how I understand it, its meaning for me. So whatever ‘interpretation’ means here, it’s not going to be something I impose on the world I find.

It's not a hammer until one uses it to hit a nail. Use is pivotal. — Banno

And there’s a similar story here. Is an affordance imposed or discovered? It’s not simply one or the other, right?

Is that what you have in mind? — Banno

No.

Maybe we can ask the question straight up: is it because things can seem to us to be something they are not that we can pretend that they are something they are not?

I have ‘no’ so far for that question. The seeming things do and the pretending we do have a very abstract similarity but are not actually connected. So far as I can tell.

If you come at it from the analytic tradition, you might want to say that there’s not even a question here: something seeming like now one thing and now another is just us conceptualizing it variously. If we can do that, we can obviously pretend using the same tools. (Talk is cheap.) That looks like just a denial of Heidegger’s first sense of ‘phenomenon’, and if you do that then you just can’t have phenomenology. I’m not ready to say that.

I’ve been dancing around it, but there may be some connection between being and pretending.

In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger addresses the two senses of ‘phenomenon’: (1) something that is shown, or brought to light, or shows itself in itself, all that; (2) something that seems to be something else, that shows itself as something it is not, a semblance. The two are related, and you can see how they would be, but he also wants to block an identification of seeming with appearing (as). It’s confusing enough that MacQuarrie and Robinson include a lengthy analytical footnote, and I don’t intend to go through all that.

We might hope to find something to do with pretending here, because it is possible for something to show itself in itself or as something else, and it’s possible for us to treat something as what it is or as something else. (If there is a connection, it might explain why talk of existence often gets hung up on cases of pretending.)

But pretending is not like a mistake, which is also taking something to be something it’s not. When your child comes out in their Halloween costume, you can pretend not to recognize them, to think they are actually Jack Skellington, say, which would indeed have been a mistake. In this case, the child may be pretending to be Jack Skellington, or not. They’ll let you know if you get it wrong. You can pretend to be Jack Skellington without dressing up at all, so the costume doesn’t tell you whether they’re pretending.

What we do in pretending does not seem to be grounded in how things can seem to be something they’re not; nor does it bring about any such seeming. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t find much of a connection.

Does the pencil as writing instrument have at least one existential attribute in common with the pencil as rocket? — ucarr

Do you mean, do they both exist?

I don’t think ‘as’ confers or conjures existence. You can use a rock as a hammer, but you don’t thereby bring into existence the-rock-as-hammer alongside the rock itself, do you?

Or going the other way, in abstracting, you can look at a basketball as a toy, as a shape, as a souvenir, as a commercial product, and so on. Those are ways in which the basketball can be seen, but it’s the basketball being seen in this specific light, the basketball that is the thing here, and how it is viewed is not another and separate thing.

Or is none of this what you meant by ‘existential attribute’?

When Tolkien pretends that what he offers to the public is a translation of The Red Book of Westmarch, he pretends both that there is such a thing and that his work is a translation. If you want to say that ‘in some sense’ the Red Book exists, then is Tolkien’s work ‘in some sense’ a translation? In what sense could that possibly be true?

I wasn’t really arguing against treating ‘__ exists’ as a predicate, just suggesting that most of the examples we think of are really about something else (pretending).

So Potter exists in one way - as a character - and Rowling in another - as the author. — Cuthbert

Of course, no one is confused about any of this. It’s just hard to figure out how we keep it all straight, logically. How would we explain it to someone unfamiliar with the idea of fiction?

For instance, when you say Harry’s a character, you don’t mean that in the same way you might say Harry’s a magician. In the book, he’s not a character in a book, but a real person.

You have just given a very good account of the kind of existence that Erin Hunter has and doesn't have. — Cuthbert

Have I? There is nothing on earth that answers to “Erin Hunter”. She doesn’t exist. Some people pretend she does, and some people mistakenly believe she does. None of that means she exists in some special, different way. Why should it? If I pretend this pencil is a rocket, does that mean ‘in some sense’ it is? Why? It’s still a pencil and I must think it’s a pencil to pretend it isn’t. I don’t even think it’s a rocket — I’m not mistaken, like the readers of the Warriors books, but pretending, like the authors.

What kind of existence do you think Erin Hunter has? (It is evidently not the kind that allows you to write books, because only people can do that.)