Beware, anti-metaphysicians, this post is inspired by conversations about nothing.
I generally think of a “thing” as being that which is equal to itself - this is a tautology, x=x, and it seems to me to be the fundamental pillar of all objective knowledge, beyond which formal logic breaks down and its rules cease to generate any meaning.
I’m also in the habit of thinking the perhaps more controversial thought that concepts, abstractions and ideas are things. Certainly they meet two important criteria for thinghood in my mind: First, they have material influence upon both the physical world (the only world, as far as i’m concerned, but that may be beyond the point of this post) and one another, and, as such, second, are equal to themselves in the sense that x=x. It’s this thinghood that allows them to function within the rules of logic to generate the meaning through which we interpret reality.
The thought that they could be anything less than things seems incomprehensible to me given that they meet the above criteria, yet elsewhere, other posters have said that they are things only by virtue of the reification resulting from the language used to describe them. My response is: isn’t this true of all things? Thinghood is function of identity and identity is simply a process of localization persisting through time - this means that all static things are a process of continued reification occuring as a result of our using symbols to interpret reality - the limits of anything, and everything, are determined by our use of symbols to describe them as things contained by those limits. In this sense, all things as we understand them are abstractions, concepts and ideas.
Now, if we are to stick to our belief in the realness of the physical world and avoid the pitfall of solipsism or Berkelian idealism then don’t we need to accept that these abstractions, concepts and ideas simply ARE the things of the physical world, that the physical world is as we understand it because we understand it that way ,and therefore our various understandings (concepts, etc.) must be things of a fundamentally and/or ultimately “objective” nature? Is it possible to treat anything as an object without conceptualizing it and reifying the concept through language?
In other words, if we are to avoid dualism, don’t ideas, abstractions, and concepts necessarily have to be things in, of and amidst the world? Objectifyable, usable, physically efficacious entities totally equal in status to all the other “stuff” of reality?
. . . or something?