Why is there something rather than nothing? (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, April 08, 2011, 20:37 (4774 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing
Check the "Language and logic" portion. For both you and david, a pronoun is not a noun, and therefore it is still just as fallacious to compare them.-dhw: Time for you to take a grammatical sabbatical. 'Something' is also a pronoun.-DAVID: Whoopee! Now things make real sense. Matt's statements did not.-MATT: It's clear neither of you read the relevant article, fine, pronoun they both are, I don't care--at its core you're both wrong!-Ah Matt, your secret is out. You have confessed that you "live for conflict" (have you told your wife?), and this is a prime example. Not for the first time, you have put forward an argument, have had it demolished, and so you argue something different. Here is the argument to which David and I were responding: -MATT: Here's another tact: It's a good question [i.e. why is there something rather than nothing?], but if we're talking about origins, it's not really a valid one. Abstracting the language, it's asking "Why is there [noun] rather than [adjective]?" -This structure should clue you in as to why the question is invalid. It should read, "Why is there [noun] instead of [noun]?" Yes you might accuse me of semantics, but I will counter with the fact that in propositional logic, we throw away arguments all the time simply because of their predicate structure--this is exactly one of those instances. You can only compare two like things--nouns to nouns, adjectives to adjectives. -Leibniz was comparing two like things: pronoun to pronoun. End of discussion.-I did read the article (honest!), but didn't comment because of the above. I agree with all David's remarks as well as with his delightful conclusion, but would add that if you really want to discuss the reality of "nothing", perhaps you should highlight the second and not the first part of the following:-"Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points coherently as intended, and many philosophers hold that the word "nothing" does not function as a noun, as there is no object to which it refers. There remain various opposing views, however—for example, that our understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as well as presences, and that "nothing" and related words serve to indicate these."-By all means let us agree to disagree on which of these views makes more sense, but drop your grammatical objections to Leibniz's question. It's all very well living for conflict, but he who lives by the word shall die by the word.