Today's Ontology Quiz

By -
Are rainbows real? Discuss.

Comments

  1. Unknown7:46 PM

    Rainbows are physical phenomena...On the other hand, if you are asking whether colors really exist or are something 'created' by our perception, I don't know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy11:13 PM

    Yes. To rule them out because they are not "as real" as, say, the dining room table is to commit a crude materialistic fallacy.

    (Gene if you start arguing with me on this one too, I'm quitting.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jim Wetzel12:26 PM

    Tongue-in-cheek answer from optics: no. (There's no place to put a screen on which the rainbow is formed.) However, a photograph of a rainbow is real.

    More serious answer: what does "real" mean?

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah12:01 AM

    Jim's question was the crux of this post: What do we mean by "real"? Rainbows are an interesting case, because they were examples used by some in the "secondary qualities" school (Galileo, Descartes, Locke, etc.) as something that was not real. (I forget offhand which of them used it, so please don't take me to mean those three I mentioned did so.)

    Now, my favorite definition of "real" omes from -- and this is going to be a big surprise to Bob -- Oakeshott, who said (I quote from memory), "Everything is real if not taken for other than what it is." In other words, "real" and "unreal" apply not so much to the world but to our ideas. The rainbow is perfectly real if we look up and think, "There is some light being beautifully broken up into its component wavelengths by some rain." It's unreal if we think it's a bridge in the sky we might cross under.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous1:24 AM

    "Everything is real if not taken for other than what it is."

    Is a square circle real?

    ReplyDelete
  6. gcallah1:38 AM

    "Is a square circle real?"

    Sure, it's a real impossibility.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Libertarianism and Violence, II

By -
I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
Read more