phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 10:07 pm
I'm not sure what you mean. I should have written "How come "ghosts" aren't "universal" ... "? I think that would have changed the meaning of what I was asking.
Well, it's always good to use the language the person you are saying is using the language incorrectly is using.
OK. In my first post I am pointing out that VA's position given his antirealism should not allow for universals to be real objects.
In Von Frassen's antirealism one can refer to unobservables as part of a useful fiction. He isn't telling people that you can't talk about them, because doing so allows for a model that is useful. So, one can talk about rats. And he would not deny the existence of any particular 'thing' that gets called rat, because any individual example is observable. If the people who believe ghosts are real are correct. IOW they are seeing actual entities and not confusing wind moaning and fuzz in their eyes with ghosts, they are having experiencing of observable objects. Just as someone who sees a rat would be seeing an observable (and not, for example, a shadow or a large dust ball in the corner of their room. They each would be having a sensory experience of an observable.
Ghosts are not like beauty or thinking that cannot be seen, if those objects are in fact real.
Instead of, for example, the sensory experiences of other things that are observable being confused with an afterdeath portion of a former human.
Like, say, rogue waves turned out to be real. You had people saying they saw rogue waves. Scientists said they were mistaken. There could not be large singlular wves in fair weather of that size. There were not abstract entities, just because scientists thought the people who claimed a forty foot wave hit their boat in otherwise calm seas. Yes, perhaps the people's emotions radically affected their perception or they were high or seasick and there was no such phenomenon. But the scientists were wrong, as video cameras in ship bridges and then satellite photographs later showed. It happens that such things happen.
But it was always a claim about a concrete entity. Just as people who experience ghosts are making claims about concrete entities.
And while one cannot point a finger at the universal 'ghotsts' that is for Von frassen a useful fiction about
plural cases of real concrete phenomena, be they rats or ghosts.
And all of that is me arguing that VA does not get to mock PH for being skeptical about universals being real objects, because his own antirealism should make him agree with PH there.
But the idea of agreeing with PH is so abhorrant he disagrees, not realizing that he is contradicting his own constructive empiricism, a la Von Frassen, whom he has quoted a number of times. Now I will guess that VA will say he doesn't agree with everything VF says. But the problem with that is that he is EVEN MORE strongly skeptical about the existence of universals than VF. He has asserted many times that unobservables don't existence. VF is more cautious. He says we should not assert that those useful fictions are real. On the other hand any instance of what gets called a rat, a constructive empiricist or a metaphysical antirealist can certainly consider real, since they are observable (experienceable).
So, you can talk about rats as a category and potentially ghosts as a category, to smooth over conversations. Each individual experienced rat is considered real, via whatever the specifics of your antirealist methodology - and both Von Frassen and VA are fans of science, though my guess is the former understands it better than the latter. You still get to use nouns, since this is a useful fiction, a way of talking about similar real things, even though VF is skeptical about the existence of the universal.
In the case of ghosts, well, you'd have to meet the particular epistemology of the particular antirealist for them to say that any particular ghost is real.
