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Written by Roberto von Archimboldi on 2025-01-07 at 11:28

So, I'm a village realist by inclination. The world is, modulo are creative abilities, entirely independent of how we represent it.

I also think that being is significance. This is because I think that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence and so to understand a word you need to grasp its systematic contribution to the truth conditions of sentences in which it can occur. But truth itself is a value determining how sentences should be used. In short, understanding words involves understanding how they systematically affect the grounds and consequences of assertions of sentences involving them. Now, given that what we talk about when we talk about the world is how things are, the meanings of our words are the things in the world. So, the things in the world are significant. Being is significance.

Can this thought be reconciled with my village realism? Probably not. I am comfortable with a world of value. Physicalism is false and silly. The village realist has no worries about values, but we do have to worry that to be significant is to be significant to somebody. So, without bodies, would there be being?

Here is my hope: without agents things would still have significance because they would have the significance that they do in fact have had those agents been there. In other words, being is potential. It is the possibility of mattering. To grasp something's significance is to realise what it does in fact mean. That we, at least, do means that things are actual but all together independent of our representation of them.

Is this just Aristotle? Can Aristotle be a village realist?

[#]Philosophy, #Aristotle, #MondayMetaphysics even though it is Tuesday, but we should definitely make Monday metaphysics a thing

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