How To Talk About Batman (& Other Fictional Characters) – Philosophy Tube ft. Dylan Dubeau

Batman Having exactly 100,001 hairs these statements aren't true

I just watched this, so many years too late. Still, I'm struck by the idea of a fictional quantifier. I can see a couple interesting uses. When talking about stories, a fictional quantifier could be an indication that you're referencing explicit canon.
You could also use a fictional quantifier when talking about real world things to show that you're referencing something other than their concrete existence. It could make explicit when you're using things like metonymy or branding. Nike the company, and Nike the brand are different things. The city of London, and the wider concept of London as a stand-in for government or culture are also different things.

There needs to be something in the notation that specifies which version of the fictional universe one is referring to. In your Sherlock Holmes example, for instance, he lives at 221B Baker Street in the original Conan Doyle stories and most adaptations. But in the Elementary TV series, he lives in New York. If, in some movie adaptation, his address is not explicitly stated, do we still take it to be 221B Baker Street, or does it fall into the "undetermined" category?

And then there's the problem of retconning. Example: In the issues of Superboy published in the 1960s, the Kents sold their farm and opened a general store in Smallville, where Clark grew up. After DC retconned his story, the Kents still owned the farm when Clark moved to Metropolis. So, is the statement "F!x [Clark Kent helped out in his parents' general store]" true, false, undetermined, or something else?
This second problem came up when I was reading Robert Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars to my daughter. At a certain point she grew worried and asked me, "Does Podkayne die?" In the originally published version, she doesn't, nut in the "Author's preferred version". she does.

What about a probabilistic stance? You can say that the probability of x and not x must be 1 when added togheter. Even though you can't say x or not x for certain, it could be useful when analizing some situations. I'm inclined to say that there's an almost negligible probabilty that "batman has 100k hairs" is a true statement.

But isn't our notion of "what really exists" too narrow? 1) Earth exists in spacetime. 2) Batman universe exists on earth. 3) Batman unverse exists in a part of spacetime.
Why are we all spacetime fundamentalists, and belittle our own imagination and say such selfdefeating things like: Justice and Democracy are "just" social constructions?

It would be neat if we could trust both kinds of experts again: the engineers and the artists.
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It's not a quantifier though. It's a fictional operator. Your quantifier reads: In the fiction, there is an x such that x is F. But the advantage of the operator is that it can be attached to sentences containing names. Even in your examples you use names not descriptions

The kinds of contradictions in question here arise even when you're talking about the real world, but about non-existent objects in it. "The king of France has 100,000 hairs" and "The king of France does not have 100,000 hairs" are both false, because there is no king of France. But that doesn't contradict the principle of bivalence because logically each of those sentences gets constructed as "there exists some x who is the king of France who [has / does not have] 100,000 hairs", and the negation of that is just "There does not exist some x who…" etc. The originally two sentences aren't actually each other's negations, though colloquially they sound like it. Likewise, "Batman has 100,000 hairs" implicitly means "There are Batman stories that claim that Batman has 100,000 hairs", and the negation of that is NOT "There are Batman stories that claim that Batman does not have 100,000 hairs", it's "There are no Batman stories that claim that Batman has 100,000 hairs".

Furthermore, fiction is entirely capable of being self-contradictory without logical problems. "The MCU says that Spider-Man Homecoming takes place in 2020" and "The MCU says that Spider-Man Homecoming takes place in 2016" are both true, even though those claims are contradictory: what's true is not the contradiction, but that the story SAYS that contradiction. We would only get a logical problem requiring the violation of bivalence if the MCU both said and did not ever say one of those things, but clear that doesn't happen because that's logically impossible.

I would go with something like a backwards F for Fictional Quantifier and, in order to avoid having potentially infinitely many of them for infinitely many stories, I'd make it inherently a dependent quantifier that requires at least one input, such as:
F(Batman)! Batman has 100000 hair on his had
(would be Indeterminate)

rather than going BF for "Batman Fictional"

The apparent contradictions aren't real contradictions. The subtlety lies in where the negations are. If we use X as an arbitrary quantifier and S as an arbitrary statement, then "~Xx Sx and Xx Sx" would be a contradiction, but "Xx ~Sx and Xx Sx" is not a contradiction, nor is "~Xx Sx and ~Xx ~Sx". For instance "∃x Sx and ∃x ~Sx" means that there exists some x for which statement S is true, and there exists another x for which it is false. If S is "x=5" and the domain of discourse is the natural numbers, this statement is true, not contradictory. There exists a natural number equal to five, and there are also natural numbers not equal to five.
Similarly, the statement "~∀x Sx and ~∀x ~Sx" is true in many circumstances. Again, if we take the domain of discourse to be the natural numbers and S is "x=5", the statement is true. Not all natural numbers are equal to five, but it is also true that not all natural numbers are not equal to five.
The example in the video is like the latter case. Since it isn't specified in the story how many hairs Batman has, ~F!x Hx. ("It is not the case that in the story, Batman has 100,000 hairs.") However, it is also true that ~F!x ~Hx. These two statements do not contradict be because of where the negation is. If the negation that they differ by was outside of the quantifier, i.e. negating the entire statement, it would be a contradiction, but since the negation is part of the quantified statement, it isn't a contradiction.
An indeterminate statement about a fictional story is therefore logically the same as a statement that is true for some x, but not for others, i.e. a statement where both "S is true for all x" and "S is not true for all x" are false.

I don't see that there is a difference between fictional and real world in terms of logic.

Take the statement "It's sunny today". This statement only is true in the limitations of a specific spot in time and space. Next, let's look at "It's going to be sunny tomorrow". Depending on how time works, we can't know for certain if this statement is true or it will only become true tomorrow. The truth of the statement only becomes knowable or existent once it becomes observable.
Let's return to Batman. As far as I know, we don't have official statements about how many hair Bruce Wayne has. Thus, it's in this very state. Furthermore, as it is possible that this number changes, we can't necessarily apply the information to other issues.

This is way closer to how logic concerning the real world actually functions. Good scientific theories are logical coherent, but they may be revised because there is a whole lot of the universe we don't perceive and more a lot we don't perceive precisely. This leaves us with two options:
a) Logic is a system of reasoning that doesn't have to correlate with reality.
b) Functional logic deals with uncertainty.

Well, there was this ambiguous true/false answer that I thought was pretty funny. https://boingboing.net/2012/05/24/ambiguous-true-false-answe.html

#SherHULKWhoFTW!

I don't see how saying that within the story, Batman has X amount of hairs is false. It is simply unknown if it's true or false until the story clarifies it. I don't see why some indeterminacy principle has to even be invented when it seems to obviously already be the state of unspecified fictional claims.

'peeking into the can of worms of 'real world indeterminacy'': Schrodinger's cat is alive?

Back to the 'lets not open up that can of worms' realm:

"Batman has 100.000 hairs", "Batman does not have 100.000 hairs": both false, is a contradiction. True
"The story states "Batman has 100.000 hairs" ", "The story states "Batman does not have 100.000 hairs" ": both false, is a contradiction. False. 'the story doesn't state' is a logical possibility

But to use the 'F!x'-quantifier as presented here : 'In the story: '
"In the story Batman has 100.000 hairs", "In the story Batman does not have 100.000 hairs": both false, is a contradiction. True.

While the question 'how would 3-valued-logic' work, is a question that will probably cost me my evening. (and substantially longer if i don't give up after that (plausible)), i would need a better example to be convinced we need it.

After all (i'm really hoping to be corrected on this one)
In our world[The story doesn't state how many hairs Batman has] ->(In our world[)
In the story[Batman has a number of hairs that is merely unknown] (])

I'll probably also lose some time on finding a way to find a notation around 'discussing fictional facts'.
because while F!x[#Hairs on batman]), needing the F!x-qualifier requires batman doesn't exist, F!x[#Hairs on batman]), being able to usethe F!x-qualifier requires a story about batman does.

"batman has 10k hairs on his head" can be true or false, just like saying "real person x has 10k hairs on his head". In the case of "real person x", the answer is "I don't know, let's find out" and we go and count the hairs on his head, and then say true or false. In the case of Batman it's the same, except instead of counting the hairs on his head (which we can't do because he's not real), we just go ask the author of batman. He'll respond and we can say, again, true or false. Sure, maybe there are multiple authors of Batman who might have different opinions, or maybe there are multiple DC universes where the number of hairs are different, but the same can happen with Real Person X, he might grow a new hair tomorrow, or lose some hairs in the shower. It's not a terribly different outcome..

This was fantastic! I'd love to pick your brain more about fiction and philosophy for a video on my channel.

RF!x,y,z[x = God, y = Satan, z = people, x murders more z than y]

Isn't there an implicature inherent in our speech? The intent of the speaker is to communicate "In the fictional world of batman, Bruce Wayne has a butler named Alfred.". There is no need to add a quantifier in this example.

I am sure there is an easy counter example to my counter argument, I just can not think of one at the moment. 

Philosophy Tube
i just found your channel, thanks to your latest co-lab. 🙂

I like the idea of indeterminacy… but now i wonder how if at all this could be worked into non fictional statements…

but if we did being Indeterminite to reality is inherently a perspective bias

the same goes for the "f!c" modifier…Person A relaying information about a proposition "within the story" [F!c] can know for certain the number of hairs on batman's head, but person B does not because that information was only revealed  in issue X of Y comic in which person B has not read that story..

So does "in the story" refer to the perspective fromt he person makign the statement or the real objective reality of the story (both [Within the stories continuity (in its entirety independent of perspective)] and or [outside the stories continuity] (in its entirety independent of perspective)) or the Infomation contained within the story telling apparatus? as in the story only retold by the apparatus (eg word of mouth, images in a book) (which is inherently a perspective)

It seems intuitive to fill details in these fictional universes with details from our experience of the universe unless the story explicitly states otherwise. Works of fiction come from the imaginations of people in this universe, so they cannot be independent of this world. It's more of a shared reality type of thing, if everyone agrees that we live in Gotham, then we live in Gotham. Batman has as many hairs as we believe he has.

Why do people care about this kind of shit

I believe the problem stems from the phrasing of the fictional quantifier itself, not how it operates.  All that would be necessary is to propose "it is defined by the canon of Batman that", instead of "in the story of Batman".  It isn't a problem to state that both "it is defined by the canon of Batman that Batman has 100,000 hairs", and, "it is defined by the canon of Batman that Batman does not have 100,000 hairs", are false because the statement doesn't claim to know how many hairs Batman possesses, but whether or not that fact has previously been defined in his universe.  This conveniently allows indeterminacy by way of avoiding the notion that there is a reasonable answer in the first place without ignoring the Principal of Bivalence, for any question that is indeterminate is false.

This does lead to the question of whether or not something is canonically explained in the series if the answer is false, but it is easily solved by stating that F!x[Batman has a quantifiable amount of hairs].  If this is also false, the original answer is indeterminate, yet this still doesn't break the rules of the Principal of Bivalence since both question can still be answered as only true or false.

1. 3-valued logic isn't a problem, even when talking about the real world. Far easier to grasp than half the stuff quantum mechanics tells us already
2. The whole prefex talked about in the first half of "in the story" doesn't need to be said for the statement to be true, it is implied and everyone in the conversation who has ever even heard of Batman knows that it is implied.