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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9322788" data-attributes="member: 82106">Considering these two things... My approach to these sorts of ideas is to deny the entire Meinongian hypothesis at the start, and more relevantly that of [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]'s proposal here as well. Meinong's Gold Mountain HAS NO HEIGHT, because 'to have a height' means it has a value, X, in meters, and lacking such an X, the property height cannot be said to be possessed by it. Since 'all mountains have a height', the Gold Mountain IS NOT A MOUNTAIN. Thus other attributes and entailments of 'mountainness' DO NOT APPLY TO IT.The application to CS' argument is then straightforward, no imagined things have all the definite properties of real things, and thus cannot be classified as being members of the sets of those things. While that won't particularly serve as a guide to which fiction you 'should' imagine, it does serve one important purpose, it tells us that the possible fictions are only bound by pure aesthetic criteria and nothing else, no logical or other sorts of constraints are binding. I can imagine Meinong's Gold Mountain is INFINITELY high, not simply X meters high. I won't say this all really effectively changes much, but by burning down all the crappy sheds of philosophic debate on an aesthetic topic, so to speak (with pardons to the philosophers) we can clear our thinking. What we imagine should be what it pleases us to imagine. All possible agendas and reasons for imagining things may be valid, but they are all equally justified or unjustified in any logical sense whatsoever. I think we already know this, so where are we now? We're at square one, where Edwards said he first got to the discussion and the immediate question he asked was "what are you trying to do?" There's no right or wrong answers to that, and no hard and fast list of what it is or isn't. Start there. All successful enterprise starts with this question, that's not a fiction.</blockquote>

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