(September 11, 2016 at 7:27 am)robvalue Wrote: Also, it's a tautology to say an object can't possibly not exist, if we've simply defined an object as something that exists.
It is a tautology but it does distinguish non-objects from objects, presences from absences, things from non-things and nothing from something.
It is tautological indeed. So to what purpose do I make such a distinction? To distinguish between the concept of an absence of anything at all and the concept of an absence of an absence of anything outside of one's own mind (there doesn't have to be anything out there but there is a difference between us conceptualizing an "out there" and us not conceptualizing an "out there").
TL;DR: I'm making a distinct tautology in order to distinguish it from a separate tautology. It's like a sub-tautology. Indeed it's meaningless to say all objects exist even objects that are entirely subjective objects but at least that way we've made a clear distinction between the conceptuallization of entirely subjective objects and the conceptualization of objects that are at the very least postulated to be outside the mind regardless of whether they actually are or if there's any way that an external world can ever be proven (I don't see how possibly).
In practice it makes no difference but I guess it opens a conceptual doorway, if only a tiny and almost certainly useless one. But usefulness is not the stuff of philosophy anyway.
