Matt said to Dan:
You've been taking "Don's dog dish" as an made-up, fictional account--is that
right? And _that's_ why "what dish" makes sense? ...It had suddenly occurred
to me, because of the lilt of some of your comments to me and to Dave, that you
were basing the usage of "imaginary" on the fact that I "made up" the example,
as in: I have no friends by these names, so it is an imaginary example. ... I
still don't know whether you think it is important or not that some cases are
anecdotal and some made up whole cloth; some are reportings of experience, some
are thought-experiments. That's what I was trying to suss out last time.
dmb says:
Right. The tree in the forest is a classic thought experiment and nobody ever
asks which forest or what kind of tree, let alone a specific and particular
tree that Don's dog pees upon. I mean, I took "Don's dog dish" to be a concrete
and particular experience (although trivial) but I take the tree that no one's
around to hear as a hypothetical fiction, as an abstract tree of no particular
type and one described in terms of being part of nobody's experience when it
falls. Concrete and abstract are very important categories when discussing
empirical reasons. I'd even say that no real conversation is going to occur
until that is ironed out.
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