On ''what there is''

This post doesn't belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can't.

First, Quine's point (in "Ontological Relativity," from which comes the "Gavagai" coinage), as well as in several other places, is just that our best scientific theories should govern our ontology. This is a fancy way of saying that if an accepted and useful scientific theory demands that we regard a given theoretical construct as "real," then we should do so. As David Lewis put it, although "sets" were "unknown to Homo javanensis," they are nevertheless indispensable in modern mathematics and therefore should be regarded as "real." This question dates at least to Plato, for whom numbers were more "real" than the things of perception they enumerated, being pure intelligible entities not subject to perspective, change over time, and so forth. Which is to say that, although they proclaim themselves to be "empiricists," Quine, et al., are really committed to idealism—to the "reality" of non-empirical theoretical entities.

This insight dovetails with what I think mahgister was trying to say in citing Goethe. But Goethe's view just follows Kant: the "real" is always already a construct of consciousness—of perception, which is sense information processed and interpreted by the mind. The real "in itself" is simply unknowable. Thus, Goethe says that perception is already "theoretical": "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." This insight makes it exceedingly difficult to know where to draw the lines between the "real" and the "imaginary"; in effect, the real IS what "imagination" constructs for experience. But that is NOT to say there is no independent reality "in itself"; rather, we just don't know anything about it except insofar as we experience it (that is, insofar as it becomes mental).

Coincidentally, I also speak (or read) 4 languages. Serbo-Croatian isn't one of them, but Croatian is. My wife's mother was a Serb, her father a Croat (we met in Germany). There is no such language as "Serbo-Croatian." Serbian and Croatian are, of course, very similar as Slavic languages; Slovenian is also similar, and Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia along with Serbia and Croatia. But, just for instance, Serbian and Croatian aren't even written in the same alphabet! Books published in Belgrade (Beograd) are printed in Cyrillic. My wife tells me that there are indeed words for "niece" and "nephew" in Serbian as well as in Croatian. I'd give examples, but this post is already egregiously gratuitous.

mijostyn: yes, the fire burns if I put my hand in it. But—as Descartes already pointed out—the sensation of "burning" is not "in" the fire but in me, the experiencer. Is fire "hot"? Well, that's the word we use in English to identify the sensation associated with fire. But do you suppose that "hotness" is a property of fire? That would be to mistake the experience of the thing with the thing itself.

Nor is the "hotness" of fire merely the excitation of electrons in its sub-atomic structure. That description merely substitutes one experience for another. It's like saying that sound is really just wave motion in the air. Schopenhauer points out that a deaf person will not grasp what sound is by viewing Chladni's traces.

"Hotness" is a subjective experience. Again, to paraphrase Descartes, if I come near the fire, I feel a pleasurable sensation of warmth; if I come too near, that pleasurable sensation turns to pain. But those sensations are not in the fire!

As for whether or not "Serbian" and "Croatian" are just different dialects of the "same" language...that's a dull topic for anyone not intimately concerned with those languages. And, of course, politics—and history—are relevant here. South Slav identity is a fraught business.