Weaving a spectral existence.

Stand back! I'm going to try PHILOSOPHY!

I've had some thoughts recently which I want to get clear in my head, but first I need a whole bunch of philosophical setting-up. Hence this post. Hopefully I'll get round to the more important stuff in later posts. For now, I'll be looking at the way we use words like 'existence'. I have an approach which captures most of the use of this word, though inevitably it doesn't account for all the jagged edges.

No doubt you've seen a rainbow. Striking in their purity, but always distant and ready to vanish away, they've fascinated us monkeys for generations, and have been woven into our disparate mythologies. We now understand that there is nothing supernatural in their appearance; we can explain it with a bit of optical theory. Hence rainbows became iconic once again: Iconic of the mundanification that, it is feared, will follow if we profane the divine by trying to understand it with the methods of science. Yet rainbows have not become mundane. The explanations provided by science only rip away the comforting stories we had used to cushion ourselves from the mystery, leaving the mystery itself pristine.

I want to focus on one striking paradox that our understanding of rainbows lays bare. On the one hand, they clearly exist. There they are, in the sky, resplendant. On the other hand, they are in the eye of the beholder; a trick of the light. They lack most of the normal qualifications for existence, like a physical location, constituent materials, or even observer-independence. Though we can see them, they are noWhere to be found. This marks them out as a special case.

Mostly, we can give a simple account of the things that exist. We can say where they are, what they are made of, how they work, and so on. They are regular features of the structure of our world, and we relate to them in a patterned, regular way. This pattern is reflected in the structure of many languages, including English. There is a particular kind of word, called a noun, which fits into the language in a specific way. Nouns were originally used to refer to simple bits of physical stuff, and the way that they are used linguistically relies on and is fitted to the way that simple bits of stuff behave in the world.

Language, then, and particularly the use of nouns, is helpful to us because the patterns of its structure mesh so well with the patterns of physical stuff. The very repetition of words relies on a corresponding repetition or at least continuation of things. We relate to these things in terms of the useful bits of information we store about them, their properties. This is reflected in the simple sentence structure 'that mountain is big'. We also encounter them at particular times, and this is reflected in tense structures.

But there are many nouns where something a little odd happens. We use them as ordinary nouns, and we flex all the linguistic variations we know around them. This use of language works just fine, and is helpful to us, as if the words were anchored in simple patterns of physical stuff. We rely on the magical fact that this all works despite the fact that there is no physical anchor, no pile driven into the mud. It is as if we had found a kind of rock that, when governed in a properly democratic manner, would be as productive as any normal human citizen.

Numbers are a good example. Nobody ever managed to trap even the most humble number to keep it in a cage. When we teach children numbers, we cannot point them out or introduce them. We can only persistently use the words in the presence of the children and hope that they pick up on the pattern we are using. For there is a pattern; we do not go far wrong using the word 'three' as if it were a noun, in listing properties ('three is prime') and in dressing the word up in all the linguistic garb befitting a noun of the soil. So long as we don't look down, but just weave the word into our patterns of speech in the standard way, we find that it serves its purpose admirably.

Indeed, there is no need for all this talk of 'as if' and 'garb befitting'; 'three' really is a noun, and the number itself does exist, despite the fact that we will never touch or smell it. For we have come to use whatever words will helpfully fit the patterns etched in our language as nouns, and as referring to existing things, whether this is backed up in a physical instantiation or not. I reckon, to a good approximation, this captures how we use the word 'existence'; we use it relative to those words which we can helpfully use as full-fledged nouns.

Coming back to the example of rainbows, we can see how it is that they exist despite being relative to the viewer. For our understanding of how they form tells us not only that this formation is observer-dependent, but that it is so in such a regular way that the observers will not go far wrong if they continue to use the word 'rainbow' as though it referred to an observer-independent thing. Accordingly, if what I claimed in the last paragraph is right, the word does refer to something. We pay the word well, and it does good service for us.

At this point we must go carefully; there is a trap to be avoided. There is a strong temptation to say at this point something like 'and so the reality of things really only consists in the patterns of language' or even 'it is only the words that have true reality'. This would, of course, be nonsense. Having spotted a slightly odd fact about the circumstances in which we use the word 'existence', in order to make these claims we would have to ignore related oddities in the proper use of the word 'reality' or at least 'true reality'. Perhaps there is something to be said here, but since it cannot be said except in confusion I must leave you to try to formulate it yourselves. Language constrains us only to talk of this coincidence of certain linguistic patterns with our use of the word 'existence' as though it were a kind of accident; it only allows us to explain the use of the word, and not to pretend we have got near its meaning.

There are some linguistic patterns which don't fit well with particular nouns. It makes no sense, for example, to enquire about the colour of an electron; electrons are too small to have colours. There is nothing to see here. But in other cases where a word we can normally use nounishly does not quite fit with the patterns of language, we make of this a deep metaphysical puzzle. The structure of tenses, for example, is not quite helpful when we speak about truth, and we prefer to talk about it in a perpetual present tense. This rather dull fact about language has provoked a fair few into deep puzzlement; is truth somehow mysteriously outside time, or in another plane of existence? Since we can talk sensibly about the locations of most things, must we invent a Platonic heaven to contain all those for which we cannot do this? Surely not. All we need to do is mark in our minds those places where these words cannot quite be used as nouns, and circumscribe our speech accordingly. For if we use the words properly, we will never need to refer to the spatial or temporal locations of such things as truth and justice.

Sometimes a word can be used sensibly as a noun throughout a large body of text without referring to anything that exists. Authors of fiction take great pains to ensure that, within the books they create, the words they use as nouns are used as normal nouns are in our day to day lives. But we know that outside the covers of the books this orchestration cannot be maintained. What sweets did Sherlock Holmes prefer as a young child? Though this is likely to be recorded somewhere, it is as likely to be recorded differently in a hundred other places. We know that if we were to attempt to use these these words in the usual way without conspiring together (as each author forms a conspiracy of one) we would run into insurmountable difficulties. To put it another way, Sherlock Holmes does not exist.

These kinds of thought are particularly helpful in a religious context, for treating such questions as `does God exist', or indeed `does God exist' (the difference is in the hyperlink). But there is so much to be said about this that it will have to wait for another post.