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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8239351" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is just a non-sequitur.The following sentence The Wizard of Oz lives in Emerald City is a real thing. I just wrote it down. I'll write it down again: The Wizard of Oz lives in Emerald City. English speakers can understand it: even those who don't know the story of the Wizard of Oz can tell that the sentence has the  syntax The [person/entity X] live in [place Y] and hence can work out that the Wizard of Oz is a person, and that Emerald City is a place.It does not follow that the Wizard of Oz or Emerald City are real. In fact they're imaginary.One of the reasons your sentence is a non-sequitur is that you refer to the worlds comprised of such thoughts but there are no such worlds. The sorts of things that are built out of thoughts include theories, novels, poems, essays, perhaps axiom sets. But not worlds.If you're interested in learning more about this, you might read Wikipedia entries on philosophy of language, semantics, reference, Frege, Russell and Meinong. One of the best accessible treatments remains Russell's 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy in which he discusses the semantics of Desdemona's love for Cassio. (Spoilers for Othello: the point of the example is that Desdemona loves Cassio is a meaningful sentence, but false, because in fact there is no such love - Iago is telling a lie.)No. Dreams aren't real - neither when I'm dreaming nor when I'm not. Nor is Doctor Who. Nor is Elminster. What's real, when I'm imagining these things, is the event of my imagining them.No. Two or more people can think the same sentence (eg The Wizard of Oz lives in Emerald City or Desdemona loves Cassio). This is what happens when people get together and create a shared fiction. The fact that they imagining the same things is real. The things they're imagining are not. That's part of the point of using the verb imagining!</blockquote>

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