Absolute generality

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with Legos? And you know how you can build different things with them? Well, imagine that there are some Legos that can be used to build anything, like a house or a spaceship or a castle or even a monster! That's what we call "absolute generality" - it means being able to talk about anything using the same building blocks, like Legos.

In grown-up terms, "absolute generality" is a tricky philosophical concept that has to do with the ability to make statements about things that we may not have any direct experience with. For example, we can talk about "unicorns" even though we've never seen one, because we have a general idea of what a unicorn is (a horse with a horn on its head). Similarly, we can talk about "imaginary numbers" even though they don't exist in the same way that real numbers do.

But here's the catch: some people think that it's not clear whether we can really make meaningful statements about things that don't exist or that we can't directly observe. The idea of absolute generality challenges us to think about the limits of our knowledge and how we can talk about things that are beyond our experience. It's like trying to build a Lego creation without knowing what you want it to look like - it's a tricky puzzle, but it's also kind of exciting!