Sherlock Holmes lives at 221C Baker Street. Santa Claus has eight reindeer. Harry Potterâs best friend is Draco Malfoy. If a zombie touches your skin, youâll become
a zombie. I just made a series of assertions. They all make sense, generally speaking. They contain subjects and verbs and are grammatically
legit. But what is their truth-value? Iâm sure you had some immediate reactions to some of them. Like, Harry and Draco? No. But how can an assertion be true or false,
if itâs about beings that are nonexistent? How are we supposed to think about things that donât exist in the real world, yet somehow seem to exist in our minds? Part of why we can think about, and talk about, and even picture in our imaginations, things that have never existed, is because of language. Without language, the only stuff weâd really be able to communicate about would be physical objects â because communicating would mostly consist
of pointing...maybe a little bit of grunting. But words allow us track to concepts â ideas we hold in our heads â even if they donât correspond with anything in real life. And here, we find ourselves in a new realm: where the philosophy of language bumps up
against aesthetics, the philosophy of art. Because when we talk about nonexistent objects, we soon find ourselves talking about imaginary worlds â worlds that donât exist, but which language
has allowed us to conceptualize in our minds. And when it comes to discussing things like meaning and existence in these worlds, we need a slightly different set of philosophical tools, because in these worlds, different rules often
apply. And thatâs because we make up those rules. In the worlds that we imagine, there might
be life on other planets. Or the past as we know it might never have
happened. Or maybe there are no laws of physics. It turns out, we can create entire universes
just with our minds. [Theme Music] When we first started to unpack the big olâ steamer trunk that is language, we talked about the idea of reference. The referent of a word is the object in the
world that the word tracks, or keys into. So, a referent of the word âcatâ is this
guy. But what happens when there is no referent? Like, whatâs the referent of the word âjabberwockâ? And how can I determine the truth-value of
such a word â or the object it refers to? Is it even possible? I suppose it could be that, when we refer to non-existent objects, weâre just speaking nonsense. But Iâm almost positive that I really do
know a lot about things that arenât real. And I think of that information as facts â facts
that are true. Like, I know that Snow White hangs out with seven dwarves, and if you told me that there were eight, and that one of them was named Sloppy, I would know you were just wrong. But where are those dwarves in the real world? And how do I know how many there are? And how could you be wrong about something
that doesnât exist? To parse this question some more, letâs head over to the Thought Bubble for some Flash Philosophy: Hereâs another assertion for you:
âThe present king of France is bald.â True or false? Bertrand Russell said itâs false. And itâs false even though this sentence actually has a couple of statements packed into it: One, it asserts that there is a present king
of France and two, that he is bald. But, there is no present king of France â France
has a president, not a king. So the whole proposition ends up being false. Since thereâs no present king of France, Russell said, we canât attribute any true statements to him. It would be just as false to say that the present king of France has a ponytail, and a nice, bushy hipster beard, as to say heâs bald. So this French king is a non-existent entity thatâs falsely been ascribed an existence, simply through an error in our understanding of language. And if youâll recall, this is similar to what we encountered with the cats-and-tails conundrum, back when we were discussing the nature of reality. If you say that âEvery cat has one more tail than no cat,â that can be interpreted to mean that thereâs such a thing as No-Cat. So, just like with the present King of France, a weirdness in our language makes no-thing look like some-thing. Thanks, Thought Bubble! Now, Russell was sure that we canât make any meaningful assertions about something that doesnât exist. But 20th century Austrian philosopher Alexius
Meinong had a different view. Meinong was convinced that we can have meaningful thoughts about objects that donât exist in reality. But, he said, in order to be able to speak meaningfully about something, it must, in some sense, have being. So Meinong came up with an ontology â that is, a system of being â that was divided into three classes: absistence, subsistence, and existence. And he posited that even non-existent things
could fit into this system. First, he said, every possible object that
you can think of absists. If you can think about it, it has absistence. This includes stuff that could never exist in real life â like unicorns, or the mythical Lost Island that our old monk friend Guanilo said would be the best place on Earth, if it were possible. And inside the group of things that absist
is the smaller subset of subsistent objects. These are things like numbers and theorems, that donât manifest a physical existence, but they also donât contain any sort of impossibility. Theyâre just not physical things, so they
canât be found anywhere in the world. Theyâre just concepts. And finally, existent objects are those that are actually here in the physical world, like cats and smart phones and current French presidents. So, existent objects have all three levels of being â they exist, they can be conceptualized, and they can be imagined. Now, I should probably point out that many of Meinongâs contemporaries viewed him as something of a nutter. He was trolled pretty hard by some of his contemporaries, who referred to his supposed realm of non-existent objects as Meinongâs Jungle â a place where round squares wander around with the present king of France, hippogriffs, and never-ending gobstoppers. And maybe you think Meinongâs Jungle is
a bunch of baloney too. But you might also say thereâs a difference between something like a round square, and something like Harry Potter. Because, you might think that Harry Potter
is real, in some sense. Like, you get that heâs fictional, but to
you he feels real. So what about that?
Is that nonsense too? Not necessarily. Hereâs one way that some aestheticians, or philosophers of art, make sense of whatâs going on when we talk about fictional objects. They begin by pointing out where, metaphorically
speaking, we talk about them. The domain in which we have a conversation,
is known as a universe of discourse. And inside this universe, assertions can be
either true or false. Our default universe of discourse is the actual
world. So in regular conversation, âHarry Potter is a wizard,â is a false assertion, just like âThe present king of France is bald,â because there is no Harry Potter, so he canât
be a wizard. Thereâs also no wizards. But when weâre having a conversation about the world of Harry Potter, weâve entered a different universe of discourse. When our universe of discourse is the world of Harry Potter, âHarry Potter is a wizardâ is a true statement, even though itâs false in the real-world universe of discourse. And whether we know it or not, we use different universes of discourse all the time â not just when weâre talking fandoms. Like, in the universe of discourse that is basketball, taking a few steps with a ball in your hand is called traveling, and is illegal. But in the universe of discourse called football, taking steps with a ball in your hand is not called traveling and is perfectly legal. So one way to solve the puzzle about the existence, and truth, of imaginary objects is to say that â in the case of Harry Potter â J.K. Rowling created a universe of discourse that is Harryâs world. And that universe shares some things in common
with our world, but it has differences too. In the real world, it is false that Harry Potter has a lightning scar on his head, because there is no Harry Potter. But in the universe of discourse that is the world of Harry Potter, itâs true, because both Harry and his lightning scar exist. So when we talk about fiction, weâre speaking within a particular universe of discourse, and our interlocutors know this â even if itâs not explicitly stated. This lets us say things that end up being true, even though the truth doesnât track to this actual world. Now, things get a little weird when our universe of discourse is a fictional world thatâs set inside of our real world, like House of Cards. Frank Underwood is the president of the United
States, but, well, so is Barack Obama. They both live in the White House and have
the same executive powers. Unlike the universe of discourse to which Harry Potter belongs, the universe of House of Cards adheres to all of the rules of our world. Thankfully, much to our credit as a species, we are great at distinguishing between universes of discourse. We can distinguish between whatâs canon
and whatâs not. We can fight passionately and knowledgeably about what might happen within fictional universes of discourse â like who would win in a foot race, Superman or the Flash? And when you think about fictional realities where different universes of discourse meet â like DC/Marvel crossovers â youâre actually engaging in some pretty serious ontological ponderings. Youâre holding in your mind an incredible number of propositions that are specific to different universes, and figuring out exactly what would be true, if those universes were combined. For instance, in a world where both ghosts and zombies exist, would it be possible for one person to become both, at death? Our ability to understand â and play around with â fictional realities helps us think about other hypothetical realities too. Like what will happen in the future, and what the implications might be of the different choices that we make. So, treating nonexistent things as if theyâre
real? âNonsenseâ probably isnât the right
word for it. Being able to create and conceptualize a universe
is a pretty amazing skill. Today we talked about nonexistent and imaginary objects, and whether itâs possible to make true assertions about them. We learned about Meinongâs Jungle and the
concept of a universe of discourse. Bananas are chom choms. Next time weâll talk about objects of aesthetic
appreciation. Crash Course Philosophy is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios. You can head over to their channel and check out a playlist of the latest episodes from shows like: Braincraft, Coma Niddy, and Deep Look. This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio with the help of all of these awesome people and our equally fantastic graphics team is
Thought Cafe.
As usual, take whatever is said in one of these videos with a grain of salt; every one of these I've seen is often misleading and sometimes just plain wrong.
More fun is this:
1) Sherlock Holmes is married to Watson.
2) Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street.
3) Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his left shoulder.
4) Sherlock Holmes was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Which of these are true, and which are false? Remember that none of them are nonsensical, and the law of the excluded middle.