So? That doesn't mean the statements you could make if you existed wouldn't be true or false. Even when there wasn't anybody, say in the first few seconds of the big bang and for several billion years thereafter, the proposition "There isn't anybody who can understand this sentence" was true. Or if you don't like indexicals, the proposition, "No conscious life exists" was true.
All the propositions that could ever be exist, though of course only an infinutesmal fraction of them will ever be said or thought. In that sense, Ecclesiates was right: There is no thing new under the sun. There, Ian, I'm really scary -- I am not only realistic about maths, I'm realistic about propositions! Who needs a boringly spare universe? To hell with this Bauhaus stuff. Fill up the corners with ornamentation! More bric a brac on the mantelpiece! jks --- "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > if there were no concrete entities, I couldn't make > statements at all, of either the true or false > variety. > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & > http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine > > Daniel Davies writes: > I don't think this would be right. For example, if > there were no concrete entities, there would still > be an abstract entity called "the set of all > concrete entities", and you could make true or false > statements about it (like "it's an empty set"). If > you were a Platonist. > > JKS writes: >I don't see what is so problematic > about the idea of abstract entities. > > I wrote: > I would guess that abstract "entities" don't exist > separate from concrete entities. Rather, they are > characteristics of the latter. > > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
