Do Chairs Exist?

[arewethereyet]

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There's a similar question in philosophy that you might find more relatable.  Philosophers argue about whether morals, rules of right and wrong, are objective, being a feature of the world that would exist even if there weren't any people to think about and having feelings about right or wrong.  But then there are moral relativists who think that rules of right and wrong are just things that a group of people -- a society -- hold to be true in common, that it's a shared convention that certain things are immoral.  The problem with this is that some people think that if it's just rules that people collectively "made up" out of thin air, those aren't really moral rules.  They're rules, but because they are arbitrarily made up by a group of people, they don't count as "real" morals.  Vulcan, Nudge, and I had a discussion about this recently which I'll try to link.

The question of chairs and other composite objects is similar.  Mereological nihilists are willing to accept that simples exist -- say atoms or quarks, something indivisible.  Yet if a composite object like a chair is just something that people as a group "made up" then is it real in the same sense as something for which the boundaries aren't simply a human invention?  

To rope Neo in here, Neo suggests, ala Platonism that there are abstract forms that exist, kind of like the laws of physics, when you have two planets near each other, they warp space in such a way that a 'force' of gravity exists between them.  In a similar way, a Platonist would say that whenever a bunch of pieces of wood come together in a certain way, they just naturally come to resemble what we would abstractly consider "the chair concept," just as when three lines come together in the right way, it resembles an ideal that we call a triangle.  The problem I see with this is that there doesn't appear to be a way to reliably pick out what composite objects resemble some pre-existing ideal and which ones don't.  The video presented the example of a "trog" which is an object consisting of a tree and a dog whenever the two are in close proximity to one another.  Trogs raise some of the same questions as chairs do.  How close does the dog need to be?  If it's a larger dog can it be farther away?  If the tree has been chopped down and sawed into boards, does a dog in close proximity to that pile of boards form a trog?  What if we take some of the boards away, is it still a trog?  In addition to the problem of simply identifying a trog, if we can simply come up with an ersatz object like a trog, is there an ideal platonic form for every such object we come up with?  Is a cow and a dog a cog?  Is a tree and a car a trar?  It would seem there are as many of these made up forms as there are combinations of objects and therefore the number of forms would seem to be infinite.  But with forms, like the line from the incredible, "When everybody is super, then nobody is."  This possibility would seem to make the idea that forms pick out things that are in some sense unique and special problematic.  Perhaps we can group forms in a hierarchy with only the truly special forms at the top?  But then forms can be part of other forms, and that seems at odds with the idea that forms pick out special or unique features of our reality.

Here's the thread on moral relativism:  Any Moral Relativists in the House?

Yeah, this bookkeepers brain is more about numbers and balance. I may have to read this a few more times to even begin to grasp any of it.

But if you need your bank account balanced, I'm your gal.