[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Dan:
You've been taking "Don's dog dish" as an made-up, fictional account--is that right?  And _that's_ why "what dish" makes sense?   ...It had suddenly occurred to me, because of the lilt of some of your comments to me and to Dave, that you were basing the usage of "imaginary" on the fact that I "made up" the example, as in: I have no friends by these names, so it is an imaginary example.  ...  I still don't know whether you think it is important or not that some cases are anecdotal and some made up whole cloth; some are reportings of experience, some are thought-experiments.  That's what I was trying to suss out last time.

dmb says:
Right. The tree in the forest is a classic thought experiment and nobody ever asks which forest or what kind of tree, let alone a specific and particular tree that Don's dog pees upon. I mean, I took "Don's dog dish" to be a concrete and particular experience (although trivial) but I take the tree that no one's around to hear as a hypothetical fiction, as an abstract tree of no particular type and one described in terms of being part of nobody's experience when it falls. Concrete and abstract are very important categories when discussing empirical reasons. I'd even say that no real conversation is going to occur until that is ironed out.