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Is Santa claus real?

All i am saying is that you do NOT make a distinction between objects, feelings, experiences, ideas, etc... when you use the term "real". If you made it clear what you were talking about rather than leaving it ambiguous then there probably wouldn't be much disagreement.
That is obviously because I'm trying to play on what I perceive as a certain narrowness in the way those like you are approaching the issue.


This is precisely the word-play and ambiguity I mentioned previously. Thank you for demonstrating it so succinctly.
Have you ever thought it is ambiguous because the neat, rationalistic, discursive precision of analytical philosophy, and much of modern thought, is limited in its use? After all a discursive description, like the theory of gravity in a textbook, is always distinct from the thing itself, being about deducing cause from effect and putting it into human language and expression. We learn about the thing, like the theory of gravity, by drawing out what the textbook tell us, but we do not learn all of thing, in its essence, and never could in this way. It is always separate from us and our knowledge. Why can't poetry tell us things which are true, but in a different way to the more discursive nature of scientific description?
 
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All i am saying is that you do NOT make a distinction between objects, feelings, experiences, ideas, etc... when you use the term "real". If you made it clear what you were talking about rather than leaving it ambiguous then there probably wouldn't be much disagreement.
That is obviously because I'm trying to play on what I perceive as a certain narrowness in the way those like you are approaching the issue.
Instead of trying to "play on what you perceive as narrowness", you could instead just say what you mean unambiguously and directly.


Have you ever thought it is ambiguous because the neat, rationalistic precision of analytical philosophy, and much of modern thought, is limited in its use?
Yes. But I would make it clear that I am not being literal, rational, analytical, etc.... otherwise your readers won't understand. Do you wish to be understood or are you more concerned with rhetoric?



After all a scientific description, like the theory of gravity in a textbook, is always distinct from the thing itself. We learn about the thing, like gravity, by drawing out what the textbook tell us, but we do not learn all of thing and never could in this way.
You will notice that a science book is very clear when it uses metaphors or figurative language. It does not equivocate with terms like "truth" and "real" as you do.

Why can't poetry tell us things which are true, but in a different way to the more discursive nature of scientific description?
You use the term "truth" "true" "real" ambiguously. It appears that you do so intentionally.
 
I did not equivocate with those terms. I in fact used them in a broader and more 'truthful' way than you did; there was never any decision to use them only in the way you wish. What I didn't do is state I was only going to consider them from the discursive, analytical viewpoint or any other. I did this, and didn't give a step-by-step explanation, in order to better draw out the narrowness of approaches like yours. Though alas I do not have the wit of a Chesterton to properly play with you. It seems I have succeeded quite well though, as you continue to give hairsplitting and terribly rationalistic replies.

You are, by the way, just repeating our whole dispute as you only want debate to be very discursive and precise, whereas I'm advocating a more broad approach which allows for that kind of debate, but also for other, less discursive ways of getting to important conclusions.
 
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Santa concept is real and lives in each and everyone that celebrates Christmas:)
 
Nice dodge. Try honesty sometime. It would be refreshing.

Then I'll try to be more direct.

Your issue is that you feel this tradition is about feeding children delusions about something that is not real, and there is some ethics violation as a result. My question to you is: is every time a parent plays an imaginative game with their kid, where they pretend they are somewhere else or are different characters, deluding them? Is making up stories that are fun and adventurous really feeding them a pack of lies?

The imagination is a good learning tool, and it helps to teach kids many different things. Santa is instructional as well as playful. Good children get visited by Santa, and Santa is also a really nice guy whose life's mission is to bring kids presents and joy.

Bottom line... if you don't want to do it for your kids, then don't. (I don't.) But your attempt to form some kind of generalized moral conclusion about other people who do it - I take it with a grain of salt.
 
So depictions of an idea aren't real? They are nothing at all?

Not in the same sense. An idea can describe something that factually exists or it can describe something that is complete fantasy. You cannot treat ideas of flying cars and dragons as being real in the same sense as ideas that describe physics or airplanes.
 
Your issue is that you feel this tradition is about feeding children delusions about something that is not real, and there is some ethics violation as a result. My question to you is: is every time a parent plays an imaginative game with their kid, where they pretend they are somewhere else or are different characters, deluding them? Is making up stories that are fun and adventurous really feeding them a pack of lies?

I've never said anything of the sort, you're talking about someone else posting in this thread. I will, however, answer. I think that, with young children, there's a bit of latitude to play with fantasy so long as it's done in a short-term and harmless manner. I have no issue with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc. No, none of them are real, but so long as kids outgrow them reasonably early, it really causes no long-term harm and I suppose it helps in the learning process, helping kids to be skeptical of the world around them. After all, usually it's the kids themselves who notice discrepancies in the stories and reject them on their own. I agree that Santa can be a good learning tool.

That doesn't change the fact that Santa Claus, as presented in the popularized sense, is a fantasy figure that never existed in reality. A 6-year old child isn't being significantly harmed by believing in Santa. A 16-year old child, however, would be. There is a time when children must reject childish things and move on to reality.

My kids used to believe in Santa Claus. Now they don't. They figured it out for themselves. If they still believed in it at their ages, there would be something wrong with them.

The real issue here is that Santa Claus is often used as an analogy for God. Oh, we let kids believe in Santa Claus, why shouldn't the same be true of God? Well, if all things were equal, if the adults were mature enough not to really believe in God themselves and they expected children to reject this foolish belief pretty early on, I'd agree. It is relatively harmless. However, when this belief is persistent and expected to be life-long, that's another matter altogether.
 
Not in the same sense. An idea can describe something that factually exists or it can describe something that is complete fantasy. You cannot treat ideas of flying cars and dragons as being real in the same sense as ideas that describe physics or airplanes.
You don't say. However no one said which way we are using the term real, and all ideas and mental images are in some sense real. The relationship between these images and ideas and corporeal existence is complex and hotly disputed.
 
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That doesn't change the fact that Santa Claus, as presented in the popularized sense, is a fantasy figure that never existed in reality. A 6-year old child isn't being significantly harmed by believing in Santa. A 16-year old child, however, would be. There is a time when children must reject childish things and move on to reality.

Who are you to determine that? Maybe for your own kids, sure... but not for the rest of society. Most adults have outgrown Santa anyway, so your complaint is moot. But in any case, I don't necessarily see anything wrong with an adult that likes to preserve some of the play of childhood. After all, you're only as old as you feel.
 
Who are you to determine that? Maybe for your own kids, sure... but not for the rest of society. Most adults have outgrown Santa anyway, so your complaint is moot. But in any case, I don't necessarily see anything wrong with an adult that likes to preserve some of the play of childhood. After all, you're only as old as you feel.

He said "as long as they outgrow them reasonably early." He didn't say they specifically had to outgrow them at the age of 7.

"You are only as old as you feel" ... yeah, sounds like a defense for child molesting. :roll:
 
he is so cute ,admit this :)
 
Last night I was reminiscing about the year when I confronted my mother about the whole Santa thing, and after reading the Virginia letter I decided it would be funny to google "No, Virginia, There is No Santa Claus." I found the following blog entry, which went far above and beyond my expectations.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus

From the above link's article, a parody of the Sun's famous response:

You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, and if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? A fair amount, actually. The Santa hypothesis claims that Santa comes down chimneys on Christmas Eve and gives presents to children: if every chimney is carefully watched on Christmas Eve, and nobody sees anybody coming down any of them, that’s very strong evidence that the Santa hypothesis is incorrect.

I'm sure a fair amount of people would feel that the whole thing is a bit preachy, but I was personally hurt very badly by the realization that everybody had been lying to me for years. I'm the type of person who is very embarrassed by the knowledge that I foolishly believed something to be which was not. I don't mind parents telling their kids that Santa is real and I don't think much harm comes from it, and in fact, I might humor my (future) children when they are very young. But if one of my (future) kids asks about Santa and presents any logical thought questioning the myth (IE: why do we need toys for tots when Santa could give the poor kids presents; how is it possible that Santa can deliver millions of presents in a single night) I will promptly congratulate them for independent thought and come clean.

For parents who stay mum even with that line of questioning, I think at that point you're really discouraging your children from thinking logically and skeptically, which are major skills they will require to thrive in the world.
 
Last night I was reminiscing about the year when I confronted my mother about the whole Santa thing, and after reading the Virginia letter I decided it would be funny to google "No, Virginia, There is No Santa Claus." I found the following blog entry, which went far above and beyond my expectations.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus

From the above link's article, a parody of the Sun's famous response:

You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, and if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? A fair amount, actually. The Santa hypothesis claims that Santa comes down chimneys on Christmas Eve and gives presents to children: if every chimney is carefully watched on Christmas Eve, and nobody sees anybody coming down any of them, that’s very strong evidence that the Santa hypothesis is incorrect.

I'm sure a fair amount of people would feel that the whole thing is a bit preachy, but I was personally hurt very badly by the realization that everybody had been lying to me for years. I'm the type of person who is very embarrassed by the knowledge that I foolishly believed something to be which was not. I don't mind parents telling their kids that Santa is real and I don't think much harm comes from it, and in fact, I might humor my (future) children when they are very young. But if one of my (future) kids asks about Santa and presents any logical thought questioning the myth (IE: why do we need toys for tots when Santa could give the poor kids presents; how is it possible that Santa can deliver millions of presents in a single night) I will promptly congratulate them for independent thought and come clean.

For parents who stay mum even with that line of questioning, I think at that point you're really discouraging your children from thinking logically and skeptically, which are major skills they will require to thrive in the world.

Oh, they'll do alright even if they believe in Santa when they're little.

Besides, I went off to a late-evening Christmas church service, and when I came home at 2, I found that Santa had already stopped by my house!
 
You don't say. However no one said which way we are using the term real, and all ideas and mental images are in some sense real. The relationship between these images and ideas and corporeal existence is complex and hotly disputed.

Fine, I will specifically defining how I am using the word. As far as I'm concerned, real refers only to those things that actually exist in reality. It you want to refer to something else, please use a different word to avoid confusion.
 
Fine, I will specifically defining how I am using the word. As far as I'm concerned, real refers only to those things that actually exist in reality. It you want to refer to something else, please use a different word to avoid confusion.
But thought and ideas exist in reality. They are not nothing.

Though there is no agreement, historically speaking thinkers have more often tended more to use the word existence or manifestation or similar terms, than real, to refer to that which exists on our plane of existence.
 
But thought and ideas exist in reality. They are not nothing.

Though there is no agreement, historically speaking thinkers have more often tended more to use the word existence or manifestation or similar terms, than real, to refer to that which exists on our plane of existence.

Thoughts, like songs and movies, may be real, that doesn't mean the concepts within are necessarily real. Try again-
 
Thoughts, like songs and movies, may be real, that doesn't mean the concepts within are necessarily real. Try again-
The concepts are real as concepts, unless you are suggesting all thoughts are the same or not intentional of a concept, by which stroke you destroy thought, and also you'd be advocating a basically incoherent position. Try again.
 
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The concepts are real as concepts, unless you are suggesting all thoughts are the same or not intentional of a concept, by which stroke you destroy thought, and also you'd be advocating a basically incoherent position. Try again.

Nice way to continue to purposely miss the point because getting the point entirely destroys your position. :roll:
 
Believe it or not, I was a good kid. I didn't like getting in trouble. I never understood while I made every effort to be good I never got the one thing from Santa that I really wanted. Meanwhile, kids who would lie, steal, and bully got what they wanted from Santa. I remember one year, when I was 4, our apartment had been broken into and all of the gifts were stolen. While Santa made a personal appearance to bring me gifts, none of them were things I had written in my letter to him. Of course now, I know that it was a member of the Denver Fire Department that saved Christmas for our family that year. That was a very noble and generous thing for them to do. But when I was a kid, it did give me a bit of a complex as the only explanation for me never getting the Atari2600 I wanted and every other kid seemed to get, was that Santa didn't like me. Now I know that it was because my family was poor. But when I was a kid, it did cause me to doubt my self-worth.
 
The concepts are real as concepts, unless you are suggesting all thoughts are the same or not intentional of a concept, by which stroke you destroy thought, and also you'd be advocating a basically incoherent position. Try again.

So, let me try to understand this...

The idea of Pikachu is real. I see pictures of Pikachu on TV, or in a Pokemon game all the time. Is Pikachu "real"? In the context that we have an established idea of what Pikachu is, yes. Pikachu is a real concept that we collectively possess. Am I ever going to see one walking down the street? No. Because Pikachus aren't real.

Now, I'm pretty sure that this whole argument hasn't really been about Santa Claus. Or do some of you actually think that someone landed on your roof and brought you presents that your family and friends did not buy for you? When someone says "Santa isn't real," they're not suggesting that the idea of Santa doesn't exist in our minds. Of course it does. Where else would it exist? But they're saying that a magical man in a red suit doesn't actually bring anyone any presents, nor live in the North Pole with elves and reindeer. There's no actual landmass in the North Pole to live on. "Santa isn't real" means "Your parents bought all your Christmas presents for you."
 
Grinch.jpeg



some of yous people. /facepalm
 
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So, let me try to understand this...

The idea of Pikachu is real. I see pictures of Pikachu on TV, or in a Pokemon game all the time. Is Pikachu "real"? In the context that we have an established idea of what Pikachu is, yes. Pikachu is a real concept that we collectively possess. Am I ever going to see one walking down the street? No. Because Pikachus aren't real.

Now, I'm pretty sure that this whole argument hasn't really been about Santa Claus. Or do some of you actually think that someone landed on your roof and brought you presents that your family and friends did not buy for you? When someone says "Santa isn't real," they're not suggesting that the idea of Santa doesn't exist in our minds. Of course it does. Where else would it exist? But they're saying that a magical man in a red suit doesn't actually bring anyone any presents, nor live in the North Pole with elves and reindeer. There's no actual landmass in the North Pole to live on. "Santa isn't real" means "Your parents bought all your Christmas presents for you."
You are confusing how the term real can philosophically be used and certainly how I'm using it, that is all. Pikachu and Father Christmas are real, they do not exist or manifest in our plane of existence though, they are only real as ideas, mental images and graphic images here. Real tends to be, though I suppose there is no set usage, a more inclusive term than exists or manifests or sometimes even being.
 
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Nice way to continue to purposely miss the point because getting the point entirely destroys your position. :roll:
What is my position? You don't even know what it is. I'll tell you, it is simply that all we think is real in some sense. I'm making the point the Goddess made to Parmenides long ago, about the three paths; that which is, that which isn't and that which vainly aims to cross between these two.

Come now, I will tell thee - and do thou hearken to my
saying and carry it away - the only two ways of search that
can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is
impossible for anything not to be, is the way of conviction,
for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not,
and that something must needs not be, - that, I tell thee, is a
wholly untrustworthy path. For you cannot know what is
not - that is impossible - nor utter it;

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

It needs must be that what can be thought and spoken of is;
for it is possible for it to be, and it is not possible for, what is
nothing to be. This is what I bid thee ponder. I hold thee
back from this first way of inquiry, and from this other also,
upon which mortals knowing naught wander in two minds; for
hesitation guides the wandering thought in their breasts, so that
they are borne along stupefied like men deaf and blind.
Undiscerning crowds, in whose eyes the same thing and not the
same is and is not, and all things travel in opposite directions!

For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not
are; and do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry.
Nor let habit force thee to cast a wandering eye upon this
devious track, or to turn thither thy resounding ear or thy
tongue; but do thou judge the subtle refutation of their
discourse uttered by me.

One path only is left for us to
speak of, namely, that It is.
 
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