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Platoboy and the Solipsist Use Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals to Pinpoint the Ontological Status of Superman
And That’s Only the Half of It!
Solipsist: Hey Platoboy, what does Superman fight for?
Platoboy: Oh, hey, Solly! Superman fights for truth, Justice, and the American way, of course. But why the sudden interest in Superman’s metier?
Solipsist: I was just thinking about that formulation: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” I mean, you wouldn’t say, “The way things are done in the USA, the method followed by Uncle Sam, and the American way.”
Platoboy: You are quite right, Solly. You wouldn’t say that because you would sound like you were retarded, which we are not supposed to say, or a conman preparing his mark for some bit of sophistry.
Solipsist: Exactly, Platoboy. And why would you sound like that?
Platoboy: Because your expression would amount to three ways of saying the same thing that you had already said before you had said the third thing. That is, you would be redundantly repeating the same thing over and over again.
Solipsist: That’s what I was contemplating. So, truth is a different thing from justice, which is different yet again from the…
