Possibility

[robust basin]

I was watching The Line with Matt Dillahunty. A caller claimed "it is possible for nothing to exist". Matt asked him to demonstrate that nothing is possible. The caller said it is possible because it is not impossible/cant be demonstrated to be impossible. Matt insisted that something not being able to be demonstrated to be impossible, does not mean it is possible - possibility has to be shown on its own, so to speak.

Similar to the caller, I was under the impression that something being not impossible/not being able to be demonstrated to be impossible, implies possibility.

Does the confusion maybe arise from two different kinds of possibility, namely epistemic and ontological possibility? I. e. it is different to be able to demonstrate possibility and something being possible. Who does make more sense, Matt or the caller?

[jaunty thicket]

Yes, there's a bunch of confusion there as a result of imprecision around the types of possibility under discussion. https://www.answers-in-reason.com/philosophy/impossibly-possible-logical-and-metaphysical-possibility-explained/

One could also do better with the original wording "it is possible for nothing to exist", because it is of course logically possible for no things to exist, but it's logically impossible for a nothing to exist.

[barren tangle]

I have a hard time granting the first two without the third.

Doesn’t seem very useful

[robust basin]

That is because the 1. and 2. entail 3. But you could have something that is not possible in our world be possible in another world. Or have something that is not possible in any world be logically possible (even though that is harder to imagine).

[barren tangle]

what other world? This is the only one I accept exists.

[robust basin]

That does not matter. A possible world does not have to actually exist. It just has to be able to exist.

[barren tangle]

How could you know another world is able to exist if it never has

[robust basin]

If you had a blue shirt on today, there is a possible world in which you had a red shirt on.

[barren tangle]

is there? Demonstrate it.

How could I wear any other shirt than what I wore

[robust basin]

If you picked the red shirt. That is all that possible means. I guess you can have some strict necessatarian view.

[barren tangle]

It’s not possible for me to have picked the red shirt based on all the things that happened to me that made me pick the blue. I do think everything is determined.

[robust basin]

I do aswell (at least in the actual world). But that isnt incompatible with possible worlds I think. The chain of determined events could have been different.

[barren tangle]

We have no good reason to believe that. We only have this world and things that have happened. We make guesses about possible future worlds because he have limited knowledge. I have a problem with people using “possible worlds” in their fine tuning arguments as well.

[robust basin]

I know possible worlds as a philosophical instrument, namely from reading Kripke. It is defenitely a useful tool but this article can probably explain it better than I ever could: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/#BasicOntComb

[barren tangle]

More and more I fail to see the usefulness of conjecture on possibility. It seems only to distract from what is the case leading to more suffering. Maybe I’ll read over this and see if I get anything new.

To answer the initial question I would say something like: it’s impossible to know if “nothing”exists because we only experience things.

[robust basin]

If you want to see how useful it can be read "Naming and Necessity". With the help of possible worlds Kripke showed that names mean/are something completely different than thought before him.

[noble geyser]

GG @robust basin, you just advanced to level 3!

[jaunty thicket]

It sounds to me like you're throwing the baby out with the bath water because apologists misuse it.

The way you should probably think of it is: things that are metaphysically possible are demonstrated so by them having happened before even if they did not happen this time. E.g. it's metaphysically possible for me to drive home from my office without getting into an accident, though it wasn't actually possible given all the conditions on the specific day I did get into an accident.

We can make reasonable assertions about what else is possible under limited knowledge, as you said, without refusing to distinguish between events that did not happen and the theoretically impossible. E.g. it would be somewhat insane to contend that, because you did not pick the red shirt one particular time, then no one should be able to suppose any one can ever pick a red shirt.

[jaunty thicket]

Consider the differences in the following propositions using different types of possibility:

1. I was driving at 5 mph. It is not possible that I was going faster than that.
2. I was driving at less than the speed of sound. It is not possible for me to do otherwise in my car.
3. I was driving at less than the speed of light. It is not possible for an object with mass to go faster than the speed of light.

[outer frost]

I've had the same confusion before. I conceptualized the caller's possibility (more akin to metaphysical or logical possibility) as "possible for all we know" vs "physically possible given/withholding certain information" (actual possibility). That said, the notion that you have to provide sufficient evidence for something to be possible in our world is still strange to me for various reasons. Like, how do you demonstrate a unicorn is possible to exist? Because there are similarly built animals? It's not like we know enough biology to prove whether or not a furry flesh and blood mammal could have a long conical horn petruding from its head 🤷

[jaunty thicket]

Not a great example, because yes we do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasmotherium

[robust basin]

That is not exactly what you mean but its just a too funny coincidence to not point it out; Kripke says explicitly that it is actually impossible for unicorns to exist in the real world because they are inherently fictional. That is, if the term "unicorn" does not causal-historically connect to a real species, but instead to a fictional one. If that is the case, no amount of found fossils in the future of horses with one horn could change that. They would not be unicorns, but something different.
Although we might find out - contrary to our current knowledge - that the term "unicorn" was actually created to describe a real - and not a fictional - species. Then they can and in fact do exist/existed.

[jaunty thicket]

Again this seems to be hypothetically supposing something that is in fact known, unless I misunderstand your meaning in "causal-historically connect to a real species". https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/unicorn-nothing-is-what-it-seems

[robust basin]

"hypothetically supposing something that is in fact known" Supposing what?

[jaunty thicket]

Although we might find out - contrary to our current knowledge - that the term "unicorn" was actually created to describe a real - and not a fictional - species.
It is not contrary to our current knowledge. You hypothetically suppose we might find this out.

[robust basin]

You mean that the term "unicorn" was created to describe an actual species? If there is a species with just the traits of unicorns that is not enough.

[jaunty thicket]

I don't know if there are dissenters, but it is at least a popular theory, if not consensus, that the etymology and concept of the medieval unicorn descends from descriptions of one-horned (unicorn) rhinos. -- TLDR the article I linked.

[robust basin]

Interesting but maybe not the concept Kripke wants to get at. Another example he gives is that of Sherlock Holmes. He holds that if Holmes is fictional, there cant exist a real Sherlock Holmes. Even if at the same time Doyle (the author) wrote about Holmes, a man existed, who did exactly the same things that Holmes did (by unfathomable coincidence), this man would not be Sherlock Holmes, if Doyle did not write about this man.

[jaunty thicket]

I agree with that. This is the valid objection to comparing Harry Potter to christian mythology, assuming we aren't mistaken about the genre of the latter. The better analog is Robin Hood or King Arthur, characters based on legends. At what point does the character become fully fictional? Is the author's belief the determining factor?

[robust basin]

Kripke would probably say, if there is a causal-historic chain of communication from the literal baptism of the man who was named "Robin Hood" to now, "Robin Hood" refers to that man, a real man. If someone made Robin Hood up, "Robin Hood" refers to a fictional man AND can only refer to that fictional man.

[jaunty thicket]

Hmm. That doesn't quite answer the question, because of the specifics in that example. I think that answers the question for King Arthur. If there was a king named Arthur who was involved in events that were later embellished into the stories about him, then that's a real King Arthur made legend. Okay.

But what if there was a Robin of Locksley or some other name that is lost to time, who was involved in some events that birthed a legend, and then some author later "makes up" the name Robin Hood as an alias for this historic figure of legend? In this case, there is a historic causal link to the story but not the name. It's similar to anonymizing a real story, which doesn't cause it to suddenly become fiction.

[robust basin]

The name does not have to literally stay the same. Obviously names are not unique anyway. Many (if not most) syntactic names exist more than once. Many "Tobias" refer to many different Tobiases. But each "Tobias" means something different. The meaning of the name is and only is its reference which is the causal-historic chain.
So if the author picks up the story with a man "Spencer" who did this and that and then calls him "Robin Hood", "Robin Hood" still refers to the man who was once baptized as "Spencer". It gets interesting when the author just hears the story without a name, like you proposed. It stays the same because it is "his" story in a way. That holds even if all the facts in the story are untrue and all real facts about Spencer are lost in time.

According to Kripke (who references historical experts) this actually happened to "Jonah" in the bible. Jonah actually existed but everything that is told about him in the bible is false.

[jaunty thicket]

A whale of a tale

[robust basin]

wdym

[jaunty thicket]

wdym wdim

[robust basin]

Never heard that expression before

[jaunty thicket]

Have you heard the expression "tall tale"?

[robust basin]

nope

[jaunty thicket]

Is English your first language?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tall_tale

"Whale of a tale" might be an American thing. Cambridge dictionary lists the structure of it as a US idiom https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/whale-of-a

And Google brings up Wikipedia for a song, seeming to imply the exact phrasing may have come from this movie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whale_of_a_Tale#/

[robust basin]

No, I am german

Also, ofc I googled it but I still dont know what you mean