For me it is not a question of what we can speak about. There are no restrictions as far as I am concerned about that which can be spoken about and what cannot be spoken about. Language is a constantly evolving medium of informational exchange, or better put, humans are constantly evolving in such a manner that new forms of useful abstraction are constantly generated and introduced either for the betterment and clarity of communication or for the twisting and misrepresentation of information flowing from a desire to mislead or dominate.

When I raise the question of what exists and what doesn't, people rightly point out that the use of abstraction "allows us to speak about certain things," or "they nevertheless describe something genuine about the world." Well I am aware of that and agree with them, and as a user of abstraction over a lifetime, and as a lover of poetry, which relies heavily upon abstraction, I have delighted in its use and still do - but this is not the main focus of my interest regarding ontology.

My point is that sets may well allow us to describe something genuine [something that accords with the facts] about the behaviour or the existential characteristics manifested by certain entities in the world such as cats, but it is the entities so described that actually exist, and not the body of information or the modus operandi of categorisation or presentation itself [the use of sets and what they reveal] that exists. The information contained in the sets are human ideas which are retailed from one human brain to another - the jug in the left-hand cupboard in Heidegger's kitchen actually exists - the cat asleep on the chair as I type actually exists.

thus I differentiate between:

(a) singular names, which are used as grammatical subjects and refer to individuals or things ("Tony Blair", "London");

(b) general names of people or things ("Englishmen", "cats") that can only be subjects in universal propositions of the type "every A is B" or predicates (in universal and singular propositions); and finally

(c) empty names ("Popeye", "Minotaur") that denote nothing and cannot be the subject of any true proposition, singular or general, but which by definition can be appropriately reduced to a combination of singular and/or universal terms that are the names of people or things, so as to obtain an expression that is synonymous with the empty name.

My interest remains in what physically exists as opposed to what doesn't exist. I consider a re-evaluation of the implications of abstraction to be vitally important as far as the very continuance of long-term human life on this planet is concerned. The dangers, which face us from the confrontation between the two opposing transcendentalist abstractionist ideologies, are enormous and frightening.

The societies of East and West continue to churn out young people habituated to ideas of "higher dimensions" of abstract notions of "spiritual beings" and "heavenly realms" where the faithful will be transported when their life here on earth ends. The subtler everyday use of abstraction is insidious - it is a creeping communicational cancer, which is as much capable of concealment and obfuscation as it is useful for enlightenment and revelation. The everydayness of abstraction [like the word 'everydayness' that I have just used] provides a pernicious reinforcement and underpinning to the more horrific manifestations of abstraction. It is to be found in the vocabularies of politicians, lawyers, criminals, philosophers manqué, huckster salesmen, psychologists, ascending in a scale of malefic abstractionist awfulness right up to the malefactors in the White House, Downing Street and the world-wide vile dens of political and religious terrorist conspirators. I know that the abstractional nouns and adjectives which refer to items that don't exist are valuable [nay, invaluable] for human description and ease of communication, but they are also the most divisive and dangerous components of language. Why? Because the very abstraction, which provides us with the opportunity and ability to convey delicate nuances of communicative meaning, has a diametric, antagonistic aspect, and that dark issue is transcendentalism.

Now when I use the term transcendentalism I refer not just to its more obvious and ugly manifestations of religion, extreme right or left-wing political theory, superstition, the belief in abduction by aliens, weirdo philosophical cults, astrology, spiritualism, but also to the more commonly believed hypostatisation that the designata of abstract nouns like love, hate, freedom, courage, time, old-age, youth, wealth, backwardness, intelligence, stupidity etc., actually exist. People speak of "finding" love or "escaping" from unhappiness as if those conditions existed in some way separately from the humans who experience such positive or negatively transacted responses to others.

I ask simply this - is the toll in human lives and misery that the negative aspect of abstractionism engenders worth it? Would we not be better informing our schoolchildren, [perhaps during their language or sociology lessons] that whilst the use of abstractions is an essential part of being human, we should see them for what they are - as essential tools, verbal shortcuts, periphrastic avoidance strategies, to aid human intercourse, and that we should not be lulled into a false sense that these human ideas of descriptive summation [the engrossment of complicated concepts in a few simple abstractions]

Many people assume that there is a template [form] somewhere for a cat. Many people automatically assume that cats exist, [it rolls off the tongue] when the truth of the matter is that only each individual cat in the world exists. Now here I am not addressing the fact that the use of the signification "cats" allows us to address the idea of all those creatures on earth that fall into the category of membership of the cat family, I am only concerned with what exists and what does not exist. The convenience of abstractions - the freedom that abstractions give us - the release from tedious circumlocution is not at issue here, what is being focussed upon is the ontological imprecision, the lack of clarity which flows from such expressions, and whilst not seeming very important in the greater scheme of things, in fact is part of the wider transcendentalist entablature which makes possible an raft foundation upon which greater more dangerous transcendentalist evils can be constructed and maintained.

When we speak of our house we are either referring to an actual physical shell object or the same shell containing a lot of other physical objects. The house, the objects within can all be felt, smelt, tasted and in some cases heard. The "set" though doesn't exist, for it is just an idea in our brains concerning the way we detect a certain relationship between the objects which can be named: "Objects belonging to Martin Heidegger," or "Objects which are usually to be found in the house of Martin Heidegger." The set itself doesn't exist, and you would find it impossible to show me such a set, you would be forced to show me the actual physical objects.

From the point of view of a chair that has no point of view it does not have a spatial position. Anything that we say about the world represents our human view of the world and the disposition of the objects that we sense in the world. In the context of addressing those objects which are contained within the walls of Heidegger's house we are imposing certain qualifications all other objects of which we are aware and objects of which we are unaware, and that is that in order to be classified as being members of the non-existent "set" of objects within Heidegger's house, they need to be physically contained inside Heidegger's house.

I attempt to get around by a simple device, that nobody can argue with [leastwise, I have never encountered anyone on the net yet who has] and that is to frame the question or statement differently. I prefer to say things like: "That which exists" or "each cat that exists" or "each item in Heidegger's house," etc. I find that it let's me off the ontological hook so to speak, for it absolves me from enumerating or identifying every cat in the world and every book, cap and swastika armband in Heidegger's house. To use phrases like that does remove to an extent the more sweeping obligation of identification regarding all the cats in the world, whose existence cannot be verified. As for numbers I agree. I believe that all numbers or the notion of number is reducible to objects, and that the idea of number was a convenience, which originated in the need to divide and subtract and add objects. I was helping my young son [6] with his homework yesterday evening when there was a particular fact he couldn't grasp. In the end I pinched my other son's bag in which he keeps his collection of stones and physically counted out stones to Connor - then subtracting and adding some etc. I believe that we grow to maturity with this object-relational concept in mind to a great extent, even though at a higher level of advanced math the concept of object totally disappears, the mathematician who calls in Wal-Mart on his way home soon reverts to the object - number mode when choosing his best buys from the shelves.

I am in total sympathy and agreement as to the efficacious use of the notion of sets such as "cats" regarding how we identify certain mutual characteristics of each cat that exists. This is not however the main point of interest to me. I am more interested if the set ITSELF exists, and not so much what useful information the device of the construction of such a notion as a set or category can provide for our benefit.

The set of all cats certainly has something to do with the real world in the sense that people employ the notion of sets as handy cognitive constructions for understanding the nature of cats or the nature of the appurtenances in the owner's house. The Darwinian classification of various flora and fauna was essential for making sense of evolution and change in living things, but for all that, his classifications don't exist - only the individuate entities that existed or had existed were real when he compiled his great work. It is not the set of cats that exists nor the compilation of the objects in Richard's house that exists - it is those cats that actually exist in the world and those items that actually exist in the owner's house.

My focus remains more upon that which exists rather than in a classification of how it exists and if it exists in similar or dissimilar way to other unspecified objects looked at statistically.

I completely agree about the invaluable importance of abstraction in matters of the description of the way objects exist and how we would be at a loss without it. We are not at odds on this question at all. That does not however in my opinion remove the importance of an investigation into what actually exists as real physical objects and that which has been introduced initially in order to help describe objects and then itself becomes falsely reified and objectified and thus becomes in itself detrimental to a clear ontological understanding of ourselves, others, and the objects with which we share the world.