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.)

I meant logical predicates, sorry, not grammatical. (It’s grammatically subject and predicate, as usual, or one noun phrase and one verb phrase, and the verb phrase has a predicate nominative in it.)

Of the thing in question, ‘__ is a pencil’ can be truly predicated, ‘__ is a rocket’ cannot; and there’s a thing in question.

So that’s two (logical) predicates and some existence.

I’m not in love with that analysis, but it’s the usual way people do it.

There’s a difference between pretending you’re a lion, and pretending you’re really a lion.

From Ruth Krauss. I think it’s in A Hole is to Dig but it might be Open House for Butterflies.

J K Rowling is an author and Harry Potter is a magician. J K Rowling exists and Harry Potter doesn't. That's four things I've learned in total. In this case existence is very predicaty isn't it? — Cuthbert

So far as the surface grammar goes, sure. “Exists” is after all an English verb, so it’s something English noun phrases can do.

You can imagine someone — many years ago now — who had not heard of Harry Potter coming into the middle of a conversation and asking who Harry Potter is. When we say, “He’s a character in a book by a woman named ‘J. K. Rowling’,” are we saying he doesn’t exist but she does? Or are we saying he exists in one way in she in another? Or are we saying he’s one sort of thing and she another?

Here are some different comparisons. Does Robert Galbraith exist? He’s J. K. Rowling, so he must, right? But he doesn’t exist as Robert Galbraith. Did J. T. Leroy exist? Not like J. K. Rowling. Someone did write the novels, and someone did appear in public answering to the name “J. T. Leroy” but they weren’t the same person. Does Oobah Butler exist? Oobah Butler wrote the articles that won awards — about a restaurant that didn’t exist but then did — but sometimes the person who showed up to collect the award, answering to “Oobah Butler”, was no more Oobah Butler than Savannah Knoop was J. T. Leroy. Does Erin Hunter exist? Someone writes the Warriors books, but not always the same person, and none of them are called “Erin Hunter”.

Honestly, I don’t think any of these puzzles are any help in understanding existence, not on their own. They are all — Harry Potter, Robert Galbraith, J. T. Leroy, Oobah Butler and the Shed at Dulwich, Erin Hunter — instances of one sort of pretending or another. Pretending is very interesting, but I’m not sure it’s the ‘master key’ to understanding existence.

It adds a layer to be analyzed; maybe that helps clarify the layer that was already there, but maybe not. This pencil is not a rocket. Two predicates there and some existence. If I pretend this pencil is a rocket, does that make it clearer in what sense the pencil exists? Or even in what sense it exists as a pencil but not as a rocket? Or in what sense no rocket exists where the pencil is? Maybe? If you incline to a ‘the pencil is a mental model’ view, then you kind of want to say everything’s pretend, all we do is pretend, so maybe the cases of obvious pretense are helpful if you can show they’re not different from ‘normal’ cases in any important way.

Pretending a pencil is a rocket is pretending something is a rocket, and that’s different from holding up your hand in a certain way and saying, “Pretend I’m holding a pencil.” Is that a funny way of saying, “Pretend I’m holding something you (and I, and everyone else) would pretend is a pencil”? (You’ll have to spruce up your vocabulary, because you only can pretend a pencil is a pencil if you mistakenly think it isn’t. Fun!) Even if it is, have you learned anything about the difference between having something in your hand and not?

And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? — Goodman

In English, that’s a field, and that it is a field, is a fact. For speakers of English, the fieldhood of that field is as neutral as it gets.

“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but who knows what it really is.” What could that possibly mean? **

Conventions don’t block neutrality; they create it.


**
Some variations:
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but maybe we’re wrong.”
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but that’s just what we call it.”
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but maybe real fields aren’t like that at all.”

It's like asking if there is some standard by which we judge chess games. — Sam26

Are you saying something like this:

"Is Bb5 legal?" -- Depends on the position.
"Is Bb5 good?" -- Depends on the position.

I first read Being and Time nearly forty years ago. Just started re-reading it yesterday, so I will return with all the answers shortly.

But they are, as described, oriented toward the field as something, and that something is different in each case. In turn, that changes what they will notice about the field, what they will pay attention to, and so on.

None of which is too say 'the field' isn't there, or is constructed. I just to want to allow that they are, in one sense, doing the same thing, and in another, doing three different things. A veteran cattleman will also look at the field differently from someone less experienced. All of these distinctions are 'off the rack', though not wrong for being stereotyped.

Nothing here strikes me as decisive.

they all see different things — Wayfarer

I agree with the gist of what you're saying, and the language I quoted is so suggestive that it must capture something essential, must be somehow right. I don't really want to say, that's just a metaphor and pass on by. But there's a reason philosophers in the analytic tradition have felt themselves pushed toward externalism. There's a reason we find it hard to escape the idea of culture. Even someone in the trenches of cognitive science like @Isaac finds a need for social roles in behavior that are not merely the individual agent's 'conception' or 'idea' of that role, but more like borrowed scripts they act out.

In short, anything that paints what's going on when two people 'see different things' is going to come up short if it treats them as isolated beings confronting the world on terms that are theirs individually, uniquely, and alone.

Even the rituals surrounding pumping gas reflect the superordinate differences in worldview between people — Joshs

Except that they really don't seem to. You can work alongside someone for years, or see them at the grocery store every few days, and never have any idea what their political or religious (or ...) views are.

Yes, the same action can carry different meanings. It's one thing to throw a pitch during warm-up and another to throw it facing a batter.

Do you think a fight between a rightwing supporter of Trump and a far left supporter of critical race theory occurs against the backdrop of overwhelming agreement about the world? — Joshs

Full responses will have to come later for me, but I can give you a quick idea of why I say 'yes' here with a joke:

"A conservative and a liberal pull into a gas station" -- I'm actually done already, but if you want more -- "and then do *exactly the same thing*." They'll both put the car in park, turn off the engine, get out, stick a card in the machine, put card back in wallet, pump gas, replace the gas cap, blah blah blah, even if one is headed to a Trump rally and the other to a Sanders rally. That's what I mean.

have you ever heard him offer a suggestion? — James Riley

Yeah, I have. I know exactly what he believes in, and what I assume he gets up to when he’s not posting here. So what? What does who he is or what he’s said before have to do with whether Biden should be auctioning offshore drilling rights? He shouldn’t be. SX just pointed out that he was. And SX disapproves, as do I, for all the good it does. But we are here just to talk, and, you know, pursue truth. And the topic of the discussion is Joe, not SX.

I’m confused. Do you two approve of what @StreetlightX pointed out the Biden administration is up to with oil drilling? Why are we talking about Trump at all here? Doesn’t Biden deserve to be roasted for this?

They talk past one another , as we see in today’s polarized political world. — Joshs

One more thing along these lines.

There’s a heartbreaking story Tim Alberta did for The Atlantic about the chairman of the Michigan state house committee that investigated claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and then wrote the report saying it was all crap. This is a middle-aged Republican, farmer, church-goer, who now has friends who hate him. Despite knowing him and trusting him for decades, they believe some dickhead on Facebook rather than him. That takes some explaining. It’s not just ‘different worlds’ to me; one of them has had a toxin deliberately introduced into their system. Polarization in my country has a basis in diverging cultures, in our absurd inequality, but it was also engineered by people who benefit from it. How much of the difference between one person’s world and another’s is down to the choices someone (or many someones) made, perhaps neither of them?

There is no recognition here that the most important source of conflict is a differences in the way that people interpret socially relevant facts (different worldviews) completely independent of motive. — Joshs

Scenario 1. Two, let’s say, scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, which they simply apply differently.
Scenario 2. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently because they use very different interpretative frameworks (maybe one’s a Marxist and the other a Freudian, like that).
Scenario 3. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, because they’re actually interpreting different editions of the text, and the words to be interpreted aren’t even 100% the same. We still refer to these alternatives as the ‘same’ book (don’t tell MU) even though they vary.
Scenario 4. 2 + 3, you get the idea.

When you drop in the word ‘interpretation’, you don’t mean to suggest something like scenario 1 or 2, but more like 3 or 4, right? Competing interpretations aren’t even of the same text, since there are no facts (like, say, the actual words of a specific edition of a text) to interpret.

One thing that feels off to me comes out in the idea of different editions of a text: the overlap between editions of some classic novel, say, is staggering. There may be a correction here, an emendation there, an addition or a deletion, but they are overwhelmingly the same. Davidson, among many others for different reasons, has made the same point, that people overwhelmingly agree about the world, and we fight over our differences against this backdrop of agreement.

Your talk of worlds makes them seem so separate. Don’t your world and my world have some things, many things, in common? It would be awfully surprising if they didn’t, given that we both speak English, live at the same time in the same part of the world, talk a lot about philosophy and psychology. Our individual worlds share some ‘sources’, it seems to me. We didn’t have to intersubjectively construct that commonality, since we filled our plates, at least partly, at the same cultural salad bar, and we took some of the same stuff. Is it ‘transformed’ once I make it part of my world, so that it’s not the same as what’s in your world?

How far off is the International Brotherhood of philosophers from you? — Manuel

If they have a building where they meet, that might also be called ‘the club’, so there’s some ambiguity there, but I meant the club as an abstraction, an organization to which human beings belong. I don’t belong to the building.

The point of the examples was that if you want to define ‘location’ in terms of some thing, it has to be a thing we think of as having a location, and that’s circular, and not in helpful way.

My hope was to start with a location that is special in some way, and ‘here’ is such a location. My thinking was, roughly, that here is where I encounter the rest of the cosmos, interact with it. Here is where the air I breathe is (even if it came from elsewhere in a tank), here and only here is where I can act (I can only act elsewhere through someone or something else), here is where my senses are operative (even if the light that reaches my eyes came from millions of light-years away), and so on. I intended to look at ‘here’ as something like the immediate environment of an organism, the realm in which things that are not me are available to me, to be used, encountered, wondered at, for me to take or destroy, and where I am available to such things, to be changed by them, to be helped or hindered. Here would be where things mean something to me.

And then the idea was to proceed from understanding what ‘here’ is to understanding other location terms like ‘there’, ‘elsewhere’, ‘where’, ‘somewhere’, and so on, on the basis of ‘here’. We never get to say that the universe is there, or elsewhere, right? We’re always within it, and we are always here, so the question — for me — was whether those ideas are the same, or related to each other, or what. For instance, some location words like “here” are flexible in their boundaries, and can encompass as little as my knee to as much as the whole universe.

Again, it’s easy enough to see why a question like “Where is the universe?” is ill-formed and unanswerable. But why is it so tempting, and can we approach the idea of location in such a way that we are not tempted to think of the universe as there, somewhere? It’s one of those perfect nine-year-old philosophy questions that we are too sophisticated to understand.

I assume you're using the club as a metaphor for the universe. — Manuel

No, no, a club. The International Brotherhood of Amateur Philosophers. That’s a thing that’s not me, but we can’t define my location relative to it. Or relative to 7. Or relative to ‘conformity’. Or relative to July 3rd, 1807.

the body becomes an essential component of the identity of here-ness we are trying to understand — Manuel

But not just as a body, but as my body, and only so long as I am a going concern. Once I’m dead, what you’ll call ‘his body’ doesn’t tell you where I am.

We have a location here on Earth — Manuel

My location, then, is to be defined relative to a thing that is not me. But not just any thing. If I am a member of a club, my location cannot be defined relative to the club. Why not?

So you're tying space to a location, here, namely where your body is. — Manuel

Not where my body is, but where I am; I am not my body, but a person, a living, thinking organism.

I mean, if you can, tell me something that isn't relational and then maybe we can proceed. I can't think of a single example. Or maybe you have some different concept of relation than what I'm using. — Manuel

This looks like a mistake to me:
1. What does it mean for me, for instance, to have a location?
2. It means that, given something else that has a location, I have my location relative to that.
3. Okay, but what does it mean for that thing, relative to which I have a location, to have a location?
See what I mean? It’s circular in a non-helpful way to define something having a location in terms of something else having a location.

So the natural thing is to start with a location that has an extra feature, as my location does, by being an instance of ‘here’. And that seems doubly right as an entry point because here is always where we are and the universe is always where we are.

We get a little more to go on too, in my recognition that there’s always a here for me, which is not true of my jacket, which also always has a location, or my phone, which always has a location but only knows ‘here’ as its location, and only relative to other things. That’s not the way my here works, because I know what neither of those does, that I’m spatial and must have a location, and that location is always at least ‘here’, whatever it is in relation to other things.

I don’t need to deny that location is relational exactly; it’s just not obviously helpful as a place to start. If there are things we want to say about it later that have a more relational form, at least by then we should have a little more to say about what that relation is and how it works. How much could we say about the relation we tried to start with? It’s like we were just doing trigonometry and then calling it a day.

What the relation is between ‘here’ and other locations, I’m trying not to prejudge; whether other locations are the same kind of location, or locations in the same sense, as ‘here’, I’m also trying not to prejudge.