PHIL 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Justin Bieber, Derek Parfit
Document Summary
To be a realist is to think that it exists as part of mind independent reality. To be an anti-realist about it is to think that it doesn"t. You can be an anti-realist about something but still think that it"s a useful concept and that it"s possible to: make true statements about it know things about it. Coolness isn"t part of mind-independent reality, but it can be true that. Justin bieber is uncool and that you know it. Anti-realists about unobservable things such as gravity may think these are helpful tools for developing technology predicting the movement of objects . But they think they are human concepts and not pre-existing parts of reality. The difficulty is that parfit doesn"t use identity in the same way that people usually use it. Identity is a technical way of saying two entities are actually the same thing: example. The day after wednesday is identical to the day before friday.
