Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Inductive evidence of the existence of non-spatial things

Think about other plausibly fundamental qualities beyond location and extension: thought, charge, mass, etc. For each one of these, there are things that have it and things that don’t have it. So we have some inductive reason to think that there are things that have location and things that don’t, things that have extension and things that don’t. Admittedly, the evidence is probably pretty weak.

3 comments:

Speed Limit Forty said...
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Speed Limit Forty said...

I wonder if this would count as stronger evidence for the claim that there are things that only *contingently* have locations. Do you have any thoughts either way about that?

Alexander R Pruss said...

No, I think the evidence for that would be weaker. For instance, apart from controversial cases like people (who I think are massless after death and before the resurrection of the body), we don't know of anything fundamental that is contingently massive, or contingently charged.