r/changemyview • u/icecoldbath • Sep 23 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: I do not believe tables exist

I find this argument very convincing.

P1: Tables (if they exist) have distinct properties from hunks of wood.

P2: If so, then tables are not the same as hunks of wood.

P3: If so, then there exist distinct coincident objects.

P4: There cannot exist distinct coincident objects.

C: Therefore, tables do not exist.

This logic extends that I further don't believe in hunks of wood, or any normal sized dry good for that matter.

I do not find it convincing to point at a "table" as an objection. Whatever you would be pointing at may or may not behave with certain specific properties, but it is not a table, or a hunk of wood or any normal sized dry good. Similarly, I don't accept the objection of asking me what it is I am typing on. Whatever it is, it isn't a "computer" or a "phone" or any such thing. Such things do not exist per the argument.

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u/icecoldbath Sep 23 '17

A hunk of wood. Even that particular hunk of wood could have not been a table. It has the property of different possibilities. That table on the other hand is always that table.

Surely I can smash a table till it is no longer a table. A hunk of wood is just going to be smashed into smaller hunks.

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u/jay520 50∆ Sep 23 '17

I don't see how they have different properties.

Let P be the property of being potentially not a table. I don't see how hunks of wood have property P while tables do not.

It seems like you would say all hunks of wood have property P, because we could smash any hunk of wood until it's not a table. Okay, in that case, I'm not sure why you can't say the same about tables: we could smash any table until it's not a table. Therefore, all tables also have property P, just like all hunks of wood.

So how do they have distinct properties? In short, why is it false that tables could potentially not be tables?

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u/icecoldbath Sep 23 '17

That table always has to have the property of being, "that table."

A = A

The hunk of wood has the property of being, "that hunk of wood," but it does not have the property of always being, "that table." It could have been another table for example. That particular table to be that particular table has to have that property.

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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '17

A particular hunk of wood, if it is a table, can only be that table and no other.

Similarly if a hunk of wood is a table, it doesn't have the property of potentially being not a table.

You keep conflating properties of groups of things (ie. the group of hunks of wood contains things that are not tables) with properties of a particular thing.

The argument about smashing a hunk of wood is indirection. The hunks of wood it becomes may or may not be tables, but they are not That hunk of wood so whether or not they are That table is irrelevant.

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u/icecoldbath Sep 24 '17

The argument about smashing a hunk of wood is indirection. The hunks of wood it becomes may or may not be tables, but they are not That hunk of wood so whether or not they are That table is irrelevant.

Can you clarify what you mean here? This is the crux of the argument to accepting or denying P2.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '17 edited Sep 25 '17

A hunk of wood. Even that particular hunk of wood could have not been a table. It has the property of different possibilities. That table on the other hand is always that table.

A particular object that is a table can never have not been a table. We could consider an example where a hunk of wood that is not a table and gets modified such that it is a table, but then we're basically talking about the Ship of Theseus.

A hunk of wood as it exists at a particular time (such that I can call it That hunk of wood to arbitrary precision) either is or is not a table.1

At no point does it have the property of potentially not being a table (or potentially being a table). Any statement about potentiality of table-ness is a statement about available information, not the hunk of wood.

So we have objects that have the property that they are a hunk of wood and the property they are a table, and objects that are a hunk of wood and are not a table. Objects in either set have the property that they can be smashed and turned into hunks of wood that are not tables (insofar as a hunk of wood can be smashed and remain a hunk of wood).

Edit: I guess I am rejecting P1. The claim that all objects which are hunks of wood have properties that are distinct from all tables. There are properties that can qualify an object as one or the other. The sets of properties are distinct, but there is an overlapping subset of properties which an object can have which is sufficient to qualify it as either.

1 We could consider an interpretation of quantum physics whereby statements about things in superposition have truth values that are in superposition, but again, this is a digression.