moin Patrice,
On 2011-05-23 05:09, Patrice Colet wrote:
We can imagine many different kinds of new animals, some also have been modelized since a long time through sculptures, we know that almost all those weird animals are not and have never been real.
To pick a much-overused example, is the sentence "Pegasus is a flying horse" true or false? Or do we need to ditch the principle of bivalence? What the heck does "Pegasus" refer to anyways? Clearly, we can all parse the sentence and assign it some kind of semantic interpretation, and no one here is claiming to have actually perceived any airborne equines recently, but I think there's more going on here than can be adequately described by "so-and-so-many synapses in these-and-those brains dumped so-and-so-many neurotransmitters of such-and-such a chemical composition into their respective synaptic gaps in response to an influx of such-and-such a mean volume of sodium ions"... to put it bluntly, how `real' is fiction? Maybe that's what you were getting at in the first place; apologies if I'm beating a dead horse, airborne or otherwise ;-)
marmosets, Bryan