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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9319751" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've never direct a play, or a film. I have scene documentary accounts of this, though. And it doesn't seem to me that the director pretends that the fiction is real in the process of producing the fiction.To talk about how RPGing works - posting on these boards - isn't playing a RPG. We can't talk about how the game play works if we're making stuff up? I mean, a social scientist, who wants to write about RPGs, isn't going to pretend Orcs are real, anymore than a historian of Greece, writing about how the Iliad was created and received at various periods in Greek history, pretends that Achilles really did the things that Homer says about him.Yes. When I say &quot;I'm twenty feet tall&quot;, the words exist. The ideas exist. That doesn't mean I'm twenty feet tall. As it happens I'm not even six feet tall.This issue prompted a debate between Meinong and Russell over 100 years ago. There are pros and cons to Russell's particular technical solution to the meaning of false or non-referring statements. But no one agrees with Meinong.Now you're just running together epistemology and metaphysics.Of course we don't know what Caesar wore. But we know that he existed, and that he probably wasn't naked, and hence that there probably was something that he was wearing. Michael Dummett defends an anti-realist approach to some of these sorts of things - thinning out the metaphysics in the absence of epistemic access. But no one goes the other way - conjuring Middle Earth into being on the basis that it's just as real, given JRRT's books, as Caesar and his kit who now are recorded only in books.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9319751, member: 42582"] I've never direct a play, or a film. I have scene documentary accounts of this, though. And it doesn't seem to me that the director pretends that the fiction is real [I]in the process of producing the fiction[/I]. To talk about how RPGing works - posting on these boards - [I]isn't playing a RPG[/I]. We can't talk about how the game play works if we're making stuff up? I mean, a social scientist, who wants to write about RPGs, isn't going to pretend Orcs are real, anymore than a historian of Greece, writing about how the Iliad was created and received at various periods in Greek history, pretends that Achilles really did the things that Homer says about him. Yes. When I say "I'm twenty feet tall", the words exist. The ideas exist. That doesn't mean I'm twenty feet tall. As it happens I'm not even six feet tall. This issue prompted a debate between Meinong and Russell over 100 years ago. There are pros and cons to Russell's particular technical solution to the meaning of false or non-referring statements. But no one agrees with Meinong. Now you're just running together epistemology and metaphysics. Of course we don't know what Caesar wore. But we know that he existed, and that he probably wasn't naked, and hence that there probably was something that he was wearing. Michael Dummett defends an anti-realist approach to some of these sorts of things - thinning out the metaphysics in the absence of epistemic access. But no one goes the other way - conjuring Middle Earth into being on the basis that it's just as real, given JRRT's books, as Caesar and his kit who now are recorded only in books. [/QUOTE]

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