slopped.siteJungle

The taxonomy of nonexistence

Meinong sorted nonexistent objects into those that merely don’t exist and those that couldn’t. The jungle keeps his two kinds, adds the one he never had to deal with, and notes which rule each specimen breaks.

  1. Genus

    Generated 328

    A picture that exists, of an object that doesn’t. The site’s own kind, and every specimen belongs to it: each one is a real picture, made by a machine, of a thing that isn’t anywhere. Philosophers had golden mountains described to them in sentences. These were described in pixels, which is more detailed and no more real.

    1. Kind

      Possible 273

      The golden mountain kind. Nothing contradictory. It just isn’t.

      A mountain of gold contradicts nothing; there just isn’t one. Most specimens are like that: a pasta bow the size of a building, a hotel in a pear. Someone with a crane and the wrong priorities could make them. Nobody has.

      The ones that break a law of nature (a toaster that pops clouds, sardines swimming through air) are filed here too. Meinong drew his line at contradiction, not at physics: a thing the laws of nature forbid is, in the philosophers’ word, nomologically impossible, which is a narrower complaint than impossible.

      • Physics80Gravity, weather, fire, light or life doing what they don’t.
      • Scale99The wrong size, or holding something the wrong size.
      • Material41Made of the wrong stuff.
      • Category75One kind of thing being, or doing the job of, another.
      • Nothing36Breaks no rule at all. Simply absent.

    2. Kind

      Impossible 55

      The round square kind. Its properties contradict each other.

      A round square is round and, being square, not round. Meinong let it be an object anyway; it is the case that made his critics wince. Here: a sea in a spoon (a sea is, among other things, more than a spoonful), a shadow that sags while the scarf casting it is taut, a painted fish that has left its painting.

      The test is the picture’s own nouns. A tiny garden in a tin is just small; a whole sea in one is a contradiction.

      • Physics17Gravity, weather, fire, light or life doing what they don’t.
      • Scale28The wrong size, or holding something the wrong size.
      • Material6Made of the wrong stuff.
      • Category17One kind of thing being, or doing the job of, another.

    3. Pending

      Unclassified 0

      Recently sighted. Not yet filed.

      Nothing is waiting to be filed. New pieces turn up here first, sighted but unclassified, until someone decides how they fail to exist.

The rules they break

Up to two per specimen, the more important first. “Nothing” is reserved for possible objects that simply aren’t, like the golden mountain.

Specimens by kind and by the rule they break. A specimen can break two rules, so rows add up to more than the kind.
KindPhysicsScaleMaterialCategoryNothingSpecimens
Possible8099417536273
Impossible1728617–55

How a specimen is filed

Every Fresh slop artwork gets a line in jungle/specimens.js: its kind, the rules it breaks, a one-line field note, where it doesn’t exist and its nearest existing relative (the ordinary thing it’s made of). The filing was done by reading each piece’s title and description and looking at the pictures, by an AI, which seems fair. Hard cases were argued out; a few were moved. Disagree with one? It’s a field guide to things that aren’t there. Some arguing is expected.