Another reason why unreferenceable entities may be intuitively appealing is that if we take a third person perspective, we can easily imagine an abstract agent being unable to reference some entity.
In map/territory thinking, we could imagine things beyond the curvature of the earth being impossible to illustrate on a 2d map. In pure logic, we imagine a Tarskian truth predicate for a logic.
You, sitting outside the thought experiment, cannot be referenced by the agent you imagine. (That is, one easily neglects the possibility.) So the agent saying “the stuff someone else might think of” appears to be no help.
So, I note that the absurdity of the unreferenceable entity is not quite trivial. You are assuming that “unreferenceable” is a concept within the ontology, in order to prove that no such thing can be.
It is perfectly consistent to imagine an entity and an object which cannot be referenced by our imagined entity. We need only suppose that our entity lacks a concept of the unreferenceable.
So despite the absurdity of unreferenceable objects, it seems we need them in our ontology in order to avoid them. ;)
The absurdity comes not from believing that some agent lacks the ability to reference some entity that you can reference, but from believing that you lack the ability to reference some entity that you are nonetheless talking about.
In the second case, you are ontologizing something that is by definition not ontologizable.
If there’s a particular agent thinking about me, then I can refer to that agent (“the one thinking about me”), hence referring to whatever they can refer to. It is indeed easy to neglect the possibility that someone is thinking about me, but that differs from in-principle unreferenceability.
I don’t believe in views from nowhere; I don’t think the concept holds up to scrutiny. In contrast, particular directions of zoom-out lead to views from particular referenceable places.
Yeah, I’m describing a confusion between views from nowhere and 3rd person perspectives.
Do we disagree about something? It seems possible that you think “ontologizing the by-definition-not-ontologizable” is a bad thing, whereas I’m arguing it’s important to have that in one’s ontology (even if it’s an empty set).
I could see becoming convinced that “the non-ontologizable” is an inherently vague set, IE, achieves a paradoxical status of not being definitely empty, but definitely not being definitely populated.
It seems fine to have categories that are necessarily empty. Such as “numbers that are both odd and even”. “Non-ontologizable thing” may be such a set. Or it may be more vague than that, I’m not sure.
Alright, cool. 👌In general I think reference needs to be treated as a vague object to handle paradoxes (something along the lines of Hartry Field’s theory of vague semantics, although I may prefer something closer to linear logic rather than his non-classical logic) -- and also just to be more true to actual use.
I am not able to think of any argument why the set of un-referenceable entities should be paradoxical rather than empty, at the moment. But it seems somehow appropriate that the domain of quantification for our language be vague, and further could be that we don’t assert that nothing lies outside of it. (Only that there is not some thing definitely outside of it.)
Also—it may not come across in my other comments—the argument in the OP was novel to me (at least, if I had heard it before, I thought it was wrong at that time and didn’t update on it) and feels like a nontrivial observation about how reference has to work.
Another reason why unreferenceable entities may be intuitively appealing is that if we take a third person perspective, we can easily imagine an abstract agent being unable to reference some entity.
In map/territory thinking, we could imagine things beyond the curvature of the earth being impossible to illustrate on a 2d map. In pure logic, we imagine a Tarskian truth predicate for a logic.
You, sitting outside the thought experiment, cannot be referenced by the agent you imagine. (That is, one easily neglects the possibility.) So the agent saying “the stuff someone else might think of” appears to be no help.
So, I note that the absurdity of the unreferenceable entity is not quite trivial. You are assuming that “unreferenceable” is a concept within the ontology, in order to prove that no such thing can be.
It is perfectly consistent to imagine an entity and an object which cannot be referenced by our imagined entity. We need only suppose that our entity lacks a concept of the unreferenceable.
So despite the absurdity of unreferenceable objects, it seems we need them in our ontology in order to avoid them. ;)
The absurdity comes not from believing that some agent lacks the ability to reference some entity that you can reference, but from believing that you lack the ability to reference some entity that you are nonetheless talking about.
In the second case, you are ontologizing something that is by definition not ontologizable.
If there’s a particular agent thinking about me, then I can refer to that agent (“the one thinking about me”), hence referring to whatever they can refer to. It is indeed easy to neglect the possibility that someone is thinking about me, but that differs from in-principle unreferenceability.
I don’t believe in views from nowhere; I don’t think the concept holds up to scrutiny. In contrast, particular directions of zoom-out lead to views from particular referenceable places.
Yeah, I’m describing a confusion between views from nowhere and 3rd person perspectives.
Do we disagree about something? It seems possible that you think “ontologizing the by-definition-not-ontologizable” is a bad thing, whereas I’m arguing it’s important to have that in one’s ontology (even if it’s an empty set).
I could see becoming convinced that “the non-ontologizable” is an inherently vague set, IE, achieves a paradoxical status of not being definitely empty, but definitely not being definitely populated.
It seems fine to have categories that are necessarily empty. Such as “numbers that are both odd and even”. “Non-ontologizable thing” may be such a set. Or it may be more vague than that, I’m not sure.
Alright, cool. 👌In general I think reference needs to be treated as a vague object to handle paradoxes (something along the lines of Hartry Field’s theory of vague semantics, although I may prefer something closer to linear logic rather than his non-classical logic) -- and also just to be more true to actual use.
I am not able to think of any argument why the set of un-referenceable entities should be paradoxical rather than empty, at the moment. But it seems somehow appropriate that the domain of quantification for our language be vague, and further could be that we don’t assert that nothing lies outside of it. (Only that there is not some thing definitely outside of it.)
Also—it may not come across in my other comments—the argument in the OP was novel to me (at least, if I had heard it before, I thought it was wrong at that time and didn’t update on it) and feels like a nontrivial observation about how reference has to work.