178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2022

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.7	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	Welcome to 2022, a whole new year.
0:07.0	I hope you're all excited for the new year.
0:09.4	It's getting harder and harder to say, you know,
0:11.6	very excited about the new year
0:13.0	when previous years have been bit of a downer
0:15.3	with the pandemic and other things,
0:16.6	but still, hoping things get better in this year.
0:19.2	We're gonna start the new year with a big one.
0:21.5	The question of what is real, really?
0:24.9	You have talked about this question before,
0:26.5	but interestingly, it's a question that physicists
0:29.8	don't like to talk about.
0:31.4	You would think that physicists who care
0:33.4	about the structure and reality of the physical world
0:36.9	would care a lot about what is real and what is not,
0:39.5	but they're much more operational.
0:41.3	They're much more down to earth than that, most physicists.
0:43.6	They want to know what they're gonna see in their experiments.
0:46.5	And, you know, at the boundaries,
0:48.0	when it comes to like virtual particles
	...

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