Claims about nonexistence are almost always slippery, especially when scientists wax philosophical or philosophers wax scientific. We can all agree—can’t we?—that mermaids and poltergeists and phlogiston and élan vital don’t exist, but controversies simmer in some quarters over genes, strings (of string theory), public languages (as contrasted with idiolects), numbers, colors, free will, qualia, and even dreams. Sometimes, the negative claims are based on a highly austere doctrine of reality according to which nothing really exists except “atoms and the void” (or subatomic particles and
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