From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:09 AM
To: Alt.Atheism.Moderated
Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures.


"Jesse Nowells" <jnowells@transbay.net> wrote:

> You said: "as I tolded you repeatedly, 'reality'
> cannot mean for other worlds the same thing you think it means in this
> world".  How on earth do you know that to be necessarily the case?

Because I know what you think it means in this world, and I know that
(by the definition of 'other worlds') this meaning cannot apply to
other worlds. Your use of "necessarily" makes it obvious that you
think I'm making a metaphysical claim, but I've told you perhaps
a dozen times I'm instead making a semantic/lexicographic claim.
Why is this such a hard distinction for you to grasp?

> If you want to use the term "actual" as a synonym for "possible" then the
> term becomes meaningless.

What utter nonsense. If "possible" has a meaning -- and it DOES --
then any synonym of it has the same meaning, and is thus not "meaningless". 

> If you want to say that the only reality of
> other worlds is their possibility or some such, that is an argument from
> ignorance.

The only ignorance here is your ignor-ance of my refutation of
lame mantra of yours. Here it is again:

You are incorrectly assuming that
'existence' for worlds has some well-defined criteria and that I'm
just relying on the fact that we don't or can't know whether a given
other world satisfies those criteria.  That's not my position at all.
Rather, I'm saying that no such criteria have been identified.

> It's just an assertion to say that "'actuality' is not applicable in the
> domain of other worlds". That's not self-evident.

It follows from what I've demonstrated to be the fundamental meaning
underlying the way speakers of English use the word 'actuality'.

> > I'm merely distinguishing two non-overlapping domains in which
> > (as I've demonstrated) the term CANNOT have the same meaning.
> 
> "Is-ness" of other worlds aren't necessarily defined by these statements
> at all.

It's defined by the way we define it. 
Your use of "necessarily" makes it obvious that you
think I'm making a metaphysical claim, but I've told you perhaps
a dozen times I'm instead making a semantic/lexicographic claim.
Why is this such a hard distinction for you to grasp?

> What you can discern doesn't give any real indication of what
> these worlds might be.

For any specified possible world, what it "might be" is precisely no more
and no less than what it is specified to be. Otherwise, the thing you say
"might be" is something OTHER THAN the specified possible world. You
obviously think a possible world is to us as North America was
to Christopher Columbus, but it's not like that at all.

> The term "actual" is understood to have one
> meaning. You want to throw out this meaning 

I've demonstrated that this meaning is not applicable to other worlds.
Thus I'm not "throw[ing it] out"; it was never "in" to begin with.

> if your objective is to dispell "semantic confusion",
> you create this very confusion by using this very term.

I don't create the confusion here; I diagnose it. It's obvious to me
that you're so thoroughly confused that you don't even recognize 
that you have no clear idea what you mean by your phrase 
"the reality of other worlds".

> if you want to assert that reality does not have the same meaning
> for other worlds than it does for this one, you need to explain why this
> is necessarily so

It follows deductively from the only rigorous definitions of 'reality'
and 'world' on the table -- viz., mine.
--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net