(October 20, 2018 at 4:34 am)vulcanlogician Wrote:(October 20, 2018 at 4:01 am)bennyboy Wrote: I'd argue that no descriptive term is real in an existential sense. Redness is very real as an experience, but there isn't actually such a thing as red matter.
What is real to you then, benny? To me, descriptive terms refer to something. Something real. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. If you could be bothered.
Have you ever looked into Karl Popper's Three Worlds theory? It's a sort of [kind of] non-supernatural update of Plato.
For him, World 1 is the physical, material world. We assume this would exist even if no people existed.
World 2 is mental phenomena. Color is in this category. Also emotions, private thoughts, all those things. Those are real to the person experiencing them.
World 3 is more tricky -- but easier to accept than Plato's Ideal realm. This is stuff invented by people but now mutually shared as real entities. I think the example he gives is a Beethoven symphony. (Not the score or the recording, but the symphony itself.) This was made by a person, and it continues to exist even though he's dead. It continues to exist even when it's not being played at the moment. It's real, but it would also go away if no humans (or musical aliens) remained. What's important here is that people can make objective [oh god there's that word again] statements and judgments about a given symphony, and debate true facts about it. No physical existence, but more than just a mental phenomenon.
I'm not expert, but I think a lot of things are in this category. For example, Sherlock Holmes is real in this way. We can say true and false sentences about him, even though he doesn't exist. "Sherlock Holmes comes from Peru," is a false sentence.
Numbers, and all math, is in World 3, as I recall. Somewhere there's a video of Roger Penrose outlining the same structure -- he apparently accepts it.
The main paper on the subject is surprisingly short:
https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documen...pper80.pdf
