I have given a fun name to my opinion that words such as “existence” and “knowledge” have exactly two meanings, corresponding to the two mental powers of sensation and reason. Playing on the fact that the former may be called “perception” and the latter “conception”, I have shaved off the prefix, arriving at the neat phrasing that existence is “ceptibility”, i.e., it is indifferent between the conceivable and the perceivable, unless one of the senses of the word is specified. My opinion is that when we say that something exists or that we know it, we mean either that we have perceived it through the senses or that we formed a concept of it. (This is also what we are denying when we deny that something exists, or that we or others know it.) Since we have either conceived it or perceived it, we may be said to have “ceived” it, as a retrogressive coinage.
I think a lot of philosophical debates are very vague because we don’t specify which sense of these words we’re using. Atheists deny that God exists because they are using the word “exists” in the sense of perception, but almost all theists agree that God can’t be perceived with the senses, and they only use the word “exists” in a different sense, although they don’t notice it, because both sides insist on talking about “existence” without defining it.
Only the name is new. This opinion was mentioned before in the following blog posts:
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