David Wallace
speaker
1,940 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jul
David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Uh in a sense there aren't any nonexistent things tautologistly.
And in the same sense I'd want to say there aren't any unreal things.
Um
And I in that sense, yeah, I'd say real exists as anonymous.
That's a delicacy in Dennett's work, frankly, because Dennett does want to draw a distinction between what he calls real patterns and mere patterns.
Um
Uh so his example of a mere pattern is like something that's metaphysically definable but not scientifically interesting.
So his example is the is the Lost Sock Centre.
Which is the point at the centre of that s sphere, which is the smallest sphere you can draw around every sock he's ever lost.
Um so Dennis will say that's metaphysically well defined.
There is such a point, he can tell you something about how it's moved over time, but it's not scientifically useful.
It doesn't play any role in scientific explanations, so it's not real.
It sounds so close to pragmatism.
There's definitely a pragmatic strand in the way Dennett talks about it.
Um
What I would say if I try to develop that is that I think what's really going on is that um
the pragmatism is happening because we're trying to
put into natural language things that are really stated in mathematical terms.
Um so the way I'd think about it is that there's a you take take take my fluid dynamics situation, there's a mathematical understanding of a fluid as derivable from the mathematical understanding of the particles in the fluid, and that's not pragmatic at all.
That's just the derivation.
Showing 1581–1600 of 1,940 · page 80 of 97
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