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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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how wonderful you are here inselpeter, over in Q and A, there is a thread on ogam/ogham, which suggests a link to basque! you're the resident expert, perhaps you could lead us to some interesting sites to persue.
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old hand
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OP
old hand
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..but if articled: all.
If I get you right, then, as soon as we refer to a specific instance of a class (or member of a set), we have a thing, independently of it's concreteness? That would be a self-consistent view, but it would mean that e.g. a thought can also be a thing.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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<<It would mean a thought can also be a thing.>>
Not only can be, but is.
Perhaps it would be helpful to ask, 'what is not a thing?'
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Wsieber: It would mean a thought can also be a thing.
Inselpeter: Not only can be, but is. Perhaps it would be helpful to ask, 'what is not a thing?Perhaps, Mr. inselpeter you will allow me to disagree with your original answer to wsieber's question. Your qualifying removal of the period in order to use the article "a" as a designator changed the rules so this contra interpretation is valid as well. eg, The waitress winks and smiles a knowing smile that indicates she remembers all-too-well the drunken promises that you made late last night and says to you..."Coffee?"Notice she did not say " a coffee". The "a" was implied and understood, just as the "Do you want...". Now to address your question... What is not a thing?That's easy. "Nothing" is not a thing. But the human mind cannot comprehend the concept of "nothingness" without "somethingness" to provide contrast, therefore everything is a thing including the absolute absence of everything. Follow...? 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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the human mind cannot comprehend the concept of "nothingness" without "somethingness" to provide contrast
Non cogito, ergo non sum?
[also echoing the comment, a thought can also be a thing]
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veteran
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Is the intent of the question to ask what things are real?
One could ask (and some do) whether words like 'force' and 'torque' and other mathematical descriptions are real or just lucky conveniences. If that's the gist of the question, there was a book I failed to read some time ago concerning the five senses in which mathematics is real that might provide some insight.
k
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OP
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Is the intent of the question to ask what things are real?Hey, you are in the process of uncovering my plot  ! As a matter of fact (ahem...) I want to sow doubt in the minds of those who define reality in terms of things...
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I found a reference to the book at Amazon - Mind Tools : The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality by Rudy Rucker.
I haven't read it and it's pretty far down on my list - don't think I'll ever get to it. But the idea is really fascinating. We use words all the time and we don't even stop to question (most of us) what they mean. We assume that we understand what a word means to us, and often that everyone understands the same thing by it. Reality, truth, facts (Tarski defined Truth as "correspondence to the facts" but it's not really obvious to me that any sufficiently large number of people wouldn't disagree with what a fact is - where sufficiently large means greater than 1). A few years ago I read Popper's Objective Knowledge. (Great book - written by a philosopher who speaks in words I can almost understand.) In it, he posits three realities - physical reality, individual psychology, and "objective knowledge" or knowledge that has survived a lot of criticism. I've only read it twice and I need to read it at least twice more for it to sink in. My faulty perception of what I've read so far is that he accepts the existence of truth, but believes our knowledge of it is imperfect. That is, knowledge is not truth. (Almost obvious when it's said that bluntly.)
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Manuscript, novel, book, atom, force, and network are all "things."
Not all things are concrete objects. Some are physical objects but whose existence we can only infer as they are too large or small to see, some are descriptions of classes of physical objects, some are concepts, some are abstractions, but all are things. We give names to imaginary constructs, too: isn't Cerberus, the mythical three-headed dog, a thing?
"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" does not encompass every thing, let alone everything. Many years ago my college rooming group stumbled during a game of "Twenty Questions" when someone used "pitfalls" as the unknown and couldn't assign it to an acceptable category...
"Nothing" is another problem altogether. Often it's confused with "zero" and with "no thing," and the potential for linguistic ambiguity has given rise to all kinds of apparent paradoxes and amusements(*). Quite a diverse spectrum for a profound concept - "All null sets are the same" is the basis of the entire number system.
(*)For example: no horse has four tails. One horse has one more tail than no horse. Therefore - one horse has five tails. Q.E.D.!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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knowledge is not truth
Indeed, as Godel demonstrated and Hosftadter rephrased in Godel,Escher,Bach, "Truth is a stronger notion than provability," meaning that there are statements that are true but whose truth (or falsehood) cannot be proved logically.
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