Very nice. I would have liked to see a section on anti-realist positions dealing with vague sentences like "more holes in the cheese than nuns in village" and the paraphrasing issue. I would also have liked to seen a ontic/ontological distinction being made. But that's just personal preference. Or treatment of everyone's favourite example, "if God creates a metal sheet with 100 atoms, and destroys one atom in the metal sheet, do we have 99 atoms and one hole - so our ontology hasn't changed since a hole has popped into existence, or is there only 99 atoms?"
Great post. I've actually been thinking about holes a lot recently, and more broadly about "nothing", and I think we might say that holes (and nothing) are real, but as something more like potentiality rather than actuality (in a roughly Aristotelian sense). It is like some Daoist texts that emphasise that it's the emptiness of a bowl, or the hub in a wheel, that makes it useful. It creates a space, and I think a space is essentially a "space of possibilities". Following that line of thinking, I prefer to reject the third premise, that "Nothing cannot exist". For example in the Book of Chuang Tzu it says,
>"There is something which exists, though it emerges from no roots, it returns through no opening. It exists but has no place; it survives yet has no beginning nor end. Though it emerges through no opening, there is something which tells us it is real. It is real but it has no permanent place: this tells us it is a dimension of space. It survives, but has no beginning nor end: this tells us it has dimensions of time. It is born, it dies, it emerges, it returns, though in its emergence and return there is no form to be seen. This is what we call the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is non-existence, and all forms of life emerge from non-existence. That which exists cannot cause things to exist. They all arise from non-existence. Non-existence is the oneness of non-existence. This is the hidden knowledge of the sages."
It's very cool to see how the idea from western philosophy that "nothing comes from nothing" gets turned on its head by Chuang Tzu. I think with this idea of "nothing" as potentiality/space, we may be able to create a really cool synthesis of core Buddhist, Daoist, Aristotelian, and Platonist ideas. That's roughly what I've been working on recently.
“Nothing cannot exist” is hard to parse and may be ungrammatical. “The absence of something is nothing” is questionable, and may be false in lots of contexts. Consider a donut underwater. The relevant absence of donut is a bunch of water.
so, debating them is missing the point? what, then, is the point of the questions at the end, questions that recapitulate the questions in the title? help me out here, philosophy understander
What if you adjusted the definition to explain that a hole is the absence of the material it is bounded by? A hole in the earth is the absence of earth, specifically, and a tunnel through a stone is a segment where stone, specifically, is not there.
But in that case, a pot or a cup or a glass or a thimble would have a hole in it.
Holes are a highly conventional kind. If the question is which nouns pick out things that are in some sense “natural kinds” that “carve the world at its joints,” holes won’t pass muster. But of course if someone says that there are holes, only a certain sort of philosophical fusspot would disagree.
Think about a mug with me - it has a cavity to hold liquid, and a perforation to put your fingers through. Topologically, only the handle is a true hole. But deforming the shape to remove its cavity would remove its utility as a vessel. Pots, cups, thimbles - if you perforate them, they become tubes, and if you deform them to remove their concavity, they become plates.
Yes. There’s topological notion of a hole and it has none of the vagueness of our non-mathematical notion. But of course it doesn’t include many things that we usually refer to as holes. (Like a hole in the ground.) And that’s fine. But of course if someone says they dug a hole in the ground, the fact that it’s not a hole topologically doesn’t make what they said wrong.
And on Jimmy’s question of whether talk of holes is playing pretend, my instinct is that the word “pretend” would be misleading. We’re (partly) going along with a tacit linguistic practice, but the practice lets us say useful things about the world.
Very nice. I would have liked to see a section on anti-realist positions dealing with vague sentences like "more holes in the cheese than nuns in village" and the paraphrasing issue. I would also have liked to seen a ontic/ontological distinction being made. But that's just personal preference. Or treatment of everyone's favourite example, "if God creates a metal sheet with 100 atoms, and destroys one atom in the metal sheet, do we have 99 atoms and one hole - so our ontology hasn't changed since a hole has popped into existence, or is there only 99 atoms?"
You actually sound more qualified to write about those issues than me. I know very little about the vagueness literature.
I might actually do that 👍
Great post. I've actually been thinking about holes a lot recently, and more broadly about "nothing", and I think we might say that holes (and nothing) are real, but as something more like potentiality rather than actuality (in a roughly Aristotelian sense). It is like some Daoist texts that emphasise that it's the emptiness of a bowl, or the hub in a wheel, that makes it useful. It creates a space, and I think a space is essentially a "space of possibilities". Following that line of thinking, I prefer to reject the third premise, that "Nothing cannot exist". For example in the Book of Chuang Tzu it says,
>"There is something which exists, though it emerges from no roots, it returns through no opening. It exists but has no place; it survives yet has no beginning nor end. Though it emerges through no opening, there is something which tells us it is real. It is real but it has no permanent place: this tells us it is a dimension of space. It survives, but has no beginning nor end: this tells us it has dimensions of time. It is born, it dies, it emerges, it returns, though in its emergence and return there is no form to be seen. This is what we call the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is non-existence, and all forms of life emerge from non-existence. That which exists cannot cause things to exist. They all arise from non-existence. Non-existence is the oneness of non-existence. This is the hidden knowledge of the sages."
It's very cool to see how the idea from western philosophy that "nothing comes from nothing" gets turned on its head by Chuang Tzu. I think with this idea of "nothing" as potentiality/space, we may be able to create a really cool synthesis of core Buddhist, Daoist, Aristotelian, and Platonist ideas. That's roughly what I've been working on recently.
“Nothing cannot exist” is hard to parse and may be ungrammatical. “The absence of something is nothing” is questionable, and may be false in lots of contexts. Consider a donut underwater. The relevant absence of donut is a bunch of water.
There are a lot of debatable assumptions in the piece. That's the whole point!
so, debating them is missing the point? what, then, is the point of the questions at the end, questions that recapitulate the questions in the title? help me out here, philosophy understander
No, I meant it was a teaching column. As I mentioned at the beginning.
Ok, colleague. I guess my mistake was thinking you were also interested in the first-order issues that your illustration arguments are dealing with.
What if you adjusted the definition to explain that a hole is the absence of the material it is bounded by? A hole in the earth is the absence of earth, specifically, and a tunnel through a stone is a segment where stone, specifically, is not there.
But in that case, a pot or a cup or a glass or a thimble would have a hole in it.
Holes are a highly conventional kind. If the question is which nouns pick out things that are in some sense “natural kinds” that “carve the world at its joints,” holes won’t pass muster. But of course if someone says that there are holes, only a certain sort of philosophical fusspot would disagree.
Think about a mug with me - it has a cavity to hold liquid, and a perforation to put your fingers through. Topologically, only the handle is a true hole. But deforming the shape to remove its cavity would remove its utility as a vessel. Pots, cups, thimbles - if you perforate them, they become tubes, and if you deform them to remove their concavity, they become plates.
Yes. There’s topological notion of a hole and it has none of the vagueness of our non-mathematical notion. But of course it doesn’t include many things that we usually refer to as holes. (Like a hole in the ground.) And that’s fine. But of course if someone says they dug a hole in the ground, the fact that it’s not a hole topologically doesn’t make what they said wrong.
Right - so by our conventional use, cavities are holes.
And on Jimmy’s question of whether talk of holes is playing pretend, my instinct is that the word “pretend” would be misleading. We’re (partly) going along with a tacit linguistic practice, but the practice lets us say useful things about the world.