British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

This is the philosophy that Professor Woodger rightly invites us to reject. He might have issued the invitation with a parade of learning and abstruse logic; but the uncompromising simplicity of the form in which Woodger presents diis erroneous view of reality embodies a criticism of it by implication that is bom more cogent and more precise than a learned dissertation could be. We are all prone to adopt the big box view of reality and we have to understand why it is wrong. It contains two errors. The first is the assumption that only those things with location have reality; that anything not in space is ' just not at all', or, more shortly still, what is nowhere is not. ' Nowhere' and ' non-cxistcnt' are regarded as synonyms, and according to this school, space itself is not necessarily real but everything is real that is in space and nothing, except perhaps time, is real that is not in space. There are, of course, those who would like to adhere to this school and yet doubt whether it is correct to identify ' nowhere' with ' non-cxistcnt'. With die leaning towards compromise of die woollyminded they then prefer to identify it with ' not quite'. hi other