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Full Idea
Make-believe games can make it easier to reason about facts, to systematize them, to visualize them, to spot connections with other facts, and to evaluate potential lines of research.
Gist of Idea
Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures
Source
Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], XI)
Book Ref
Yablo,Stephen: 'Things: Philosophical Papers vol. 2' [OUP 2010], p.132
A Reaction
This is the key pragmatic defence of the fictionalist view of abstract objects. Fictions are devices to help us think better. I think a lot of ontology turns out that way.
Related Idea
Idea 10004 Our minds are at their best when reasoning about objects [Hofweber]
| 14429 | Classes are logical fictions, made from defining characteristics [Russell] |
| 9497 | Without modality, Armstrong falls back on fictionalism to support counterfactual laws [Bird on Armstrong] |
| 8909 | Abstractions may well be verbal fictions, in which we ignore some features of an object [Lewis] |
| 10023 | Talk of mirror images is 'encoded fictions' about real facts [Hodes] |
| 8864 | We quantify over events, worlds, etc. in order to make logical possibilities clearer [Yablo] |
| 19494 | Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts [Yablo] |
| 19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
| 19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
| 19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
| 10262 | Fictionalism eschews the abstract, but it still needs the possible (without model theory) [Shapiro] |
| 10277 | Structuralism blurs the distinction between mathematical and ordinary objects [Shapiro] |
| 12445 | If fictional objects really don't exist, then they aren't abstract objects [Azzouni] |