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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9629571" data-attributes="member: 42582">If only philosophers and logicians had thought about this stuff . . .Here's the standard analysis of Pegasus has feathers - it was first set out by Bertrand Russell, and for simplicity I follow Quine's work in treating "Pegasus" as a predicate:∀x (Is Pegasus (x) → Is feathered (x))There has been a lot of work done in the 120-odd years since Russell set out his theory of descriptions, and not everyone agrees with Russell's analysis - but your suggestion that there is some tension between denying the existence of Pegasus and affirming that Pegasus has feathers is just wrong.This claim is highly contentious. And in my view is doubtful, at least until you explain those senses.There is literature on this: see eg Russell's Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, or Nelson Goodman's work - and also Dummett's criticism of their approach to the nature of redness (he thinks they have been fallen into a fallacy about the nature of properties, and the predicates that convey them, by focusing on a colour like red rather than a shape like square).But anyway, suggesting that Narnia exists as redness does is just silly. Here's a simple explanation as to why:The predicate "is red" expresses the property of redness, in the sense that the sentence ∃(x) (Is red (x)) - that is, "there exists at least one red thing" - picks out the state of affairs of there being a thing (x) that is red (ie possesses the property of redness).Let's introduce a predicate "is Narnia" which expresses the property of being Narnia, and another predicate "is in Narnia", which expresses the property of being an element of the totality Narnia. Those predicates would figure in sentences such as ∃(x) (Is Narnia (x)) and ∃(x) (Is in Narnia (x)).Now, the first of my existential quantifications is true: I am looking at a red book on my desk, and so there does indeed exist at least one red thing.However, the latter two existential quantifications are both false. There is nothing that is Narnia - it doesn't exist! And there is nothing that is an element or component or part of Narnia - not existing, it has no such elements or components or parts.Now it is possible to explain why it is true to say that Narnia contains kings and queens but not starships and Klingons. A lot of work has been done on truth in fiction (see eg this discussion: <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictional-entities/" target="_blank">Fictional Entities (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)</a>). But that work begins from a recognition that fictional things, being fictional, don't exist!   The "facts" you are referring to are things that the GM imagines.And the reasoning you refer to is not functionally equivalent to an IRL scientist or mathematician. For instance, as a player of a RPG you can't perform an experiment or investigation to determine some property of a thing the GM tells you about. You can ask the GM to tell you more about the thing. You can tell the GM that you perform some experiment - what that will do is prompt you the GM to tell you more about the thing. But prompting a person for answers does not functionally resemble actual scientific (or even common-place) investigation, and nor does it involve abductive, deductive or inductive reasoning (unless you are engaging in inductive reasoning about the beliefs of the GM - eg pemerton is soft-hearted and so probably won't have decided that the killer is the one who would make this a truly tragic turn of events). The reasoning is common-sense reasoning about common-sense relationships between relatively simple things, informed by tropes.For instance, consider the extract from The Vanishing Conjurer that I posted upthread:There is no process of abductive, deductive or inductive reasoning that can lead the players to the conclusion that Leclair is trapped between two planes of existence and can escape if a the gate is opened. There is no inductive reasoning possible about the supernatural, by definition (as Hobbes and Hume both pointed out).What the players actually have to do is to generalise from their knowledge of Ctuhulhu-esque tropes. If you want to characterise this as inductive reasoning, it is not inductive reasoning performed by them as their PCs, but rather meta-game inductive reasoning that depends upon the players knowing the sort of (quasi-)literary endeavour they are engaged in, in playing the game.I am not going to try and explain BW-esque RPGing to you. I've already posted about it extensively in this thread, to no apparent avail. And I take it that you are not prepared to download and read the free PDF.But in AW, the players have no power to create new fiction of the sort that you are worried about. So there's your answer to that!</blockquote>

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