All Possible Things are Under the Sun
Having a look at possible v necessary in Ontology class these days. It's amazing to find that I actually -have- been thinking about all of this for the past thirty*ahem* years.
It's also really disappointing to realise that Kripke's right and there is absolutely NO chance that I'll ever get to pet a unicorn. Cornelia is disappoint. (There's only one person in the entire world (our actual world) who might get that reference.)
I'm a writer, so of course I need "make believe" in my life without fear that Heinlein's views of pandimensional solipsism actually apply. But I've also been a devoted fangirl of Terry Pratchett so I allowed that his theory of the trousers of reality might have something to them. I don't know now, though. Kripke's argument that the identifier of "unicorn" is established as myth only seems pretty solid. It is a necessary fact about unicorns that they exist in a non-real sense, just as Quine's Pegasus exists as an idea but not in reality. So even if we were to posit that there are, in some possible world, fossilised remains of horse-like creatures with horns growing from their foreheads, they couldn't be called unicorns. And if in the deepest jungles of Brazil some logger stumbled across a virgin with a horned, horse-like creature with its head in her lap (and don't get me started on the sociological implications of that aspect of the myth, please) it wouldn't be a unicorn. Not to say we wouldn't -call- it a unicorn, because we're lazy humans so of course we would. But it would be disappointingly banal, the same way that dragons turned out to be dinosaurs. Wouldn't dinosaurs be even cooler if we hadn't originally thought they could breathe fire and the huge ones could fly?
Dammit, Kripke, you owe me a pony.
dinosaurs are still pretty rad.
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