Soisi, you actually, i should say that iam broadly sympathetic to your, most of your points of view here. But it's my job, of course, as as the host, to pretend to be sceptical at appropriate times. So i think i' buy that. Ind i get that that were we're talking about microsopt in a way that conveys useful information about the world. But really, it's because it conveys useful info about the real things that make up what we think of as microsopt but then wouldn't the same logic say that tables and chairs don't exist?
Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.
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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.
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