The general does not exist, there are only specifics.
If I have a thought in my head, “Texans like their guns”, that thought got there from a finite amount of specific interactions. Maybe I heard a joke about texans. Maybe my family is from texas. Maybe I hear a lot about it on the news.
“People don’t like it when you cut them off mid sentence”. Which people?
At a local meetup we do a thing called encounter groups, and one rule of encounter groups is “there is no ‘the group’, just individual people”. Having conversations in that mode has been incredibly helpful to realize that, in fact, there is no “the group”.
But why stop at individual people? This kind of ontological deflationism can naturally be continued to say there are no individual people, just cells, and no cells, just molecules, and no molecules, just atoms, and so on. You might object that it’s absurd to say that people don’t exist, but then why isn’t it also absurd to say that groups don’t exist?
The idea was less “Individual humans are ontologically basic” and more: I see I often talking about broad groups of people has been less useful than dropping down to talk about interactions I’ve had with individual people.
In writing the comment I was focusing more on what the action I wanted to take was (think about specific encounters with people when evaluating my impressions) and less my my ontological claims of what exists. I see how me lax opening sentence doesn’t make that clear :)
The general does not exist, there are only specifics.
If I have a thought in my head, “Texans like their guns”, that thought got there from a finite amount of specific interactions. Maybe I heard a joke about texans. Maybe my family is from texas. Maybe I hear a lot about it on the news.
“People don’t like it when you cut them off mid sentence”. Which people?
At a local meetup we do a thing called encounter groups, and one rule of encounter groups is “there is no ‘the group’, just individual people”. Having conversations in that mode has been incredibly helpful to realize that, in fact, there is no “the group”.
But why stop at individual people? This kind of ontological deflationism can naturally be continued to say there are no individual people, just cells, and no cells, just molecules, and no molecules, just atoms, and so on. You might object that it’s absurd to say that people don’t exist, but then why isn’t it also absurd to say that groups don’t exist?
The idea was less “Individual humans are ontologically basic” and more: I see I often talking about broad groups of people has been less useful than dropping down to talk about interactions I’ve had with individual people.
In writing the comment I was focusing more on what the action I wanted to take was (think about specific encounters with people when evaluating my impressions) and less my my ontological claims of what exists. I see how me lax opening sentence doesn’t make that clear :)