I was just explaining how you could know they exist - by inference and reasoning based on other minds speaking, writing and actions, because from your last post you seemed to suggest they don’t exist at all just because it is imagination or fictions in their heads.
That’s fine… I can sympathize with the idea that this must’ve been a draining exercise. Perhaps, if you’d want to explore this again in the future, see if you can separate out the questions a bit. I feel this became as muddy as it did, because a dynamic slips in where you seek out dialogue, but you end up with a rather pervasive monologue of the self. It becomes very difficult to move towards some kind of transformation from that space.
Bit of a cold, meta-analysis there. I hope you don’t mind. All the best!
Really I was just pointing out that we can say that fictional or imaginary characters exist or are real in a fictional sense or imaginary sense, or we say that they are not real and do not exist, because that is just what is meant by ‘fictional’ or ‘imaginary’.
The upshot being that terms can be used in different ways, and if those ways are not consistent, we should not let that lead us to imagine that there could be some fact of the matter that would settle the question―because that would constitute a kind of reification of language.
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