So to give you, ah, a mundane example.

If you're on a diet, it might be important to you that you're soft drink.

Is sugar free on?

This?

Seems to be attributing what I would call a negative property to it.

It's saying something that it doesn't have.

The status of such a property seems quite mysterious.

Okay, so it's true of you, for instance, that your five feet 10 inches tall and that's I'd say that's a property or quality that you have.

But this old soul, another set of properties, right?

So if you're five feet 10 inches tall, it's also true of you that you're not five feet 11 inches tall.

Now, is this a genuine property that you have?

Here's an argument that says it's not.

If you're five feet 10 inches tall, then we can say that you're not five feet 11 inches tall.

But then you're also know six feet, not six feet one, not six week, too.

If there would be these negative properties, it seems you have to have an infinite number of thumb.

So that straightaway is telling you that there's something fishy about him.

But then again, how many regular positive properties do you have anyway?

I mean, if I started writing down your properties, I suggest I could just go on forever.

Anyway, in the the only limit to my list would probably be the limits of my imagination.

So if you're gonna say that's something dodgy about negative properties because there's an infinite number of them, then you'd have to know Well, this seems to be an infinite number of positive properties anyway, so that shows it it it starts to become very difficult to rule out these cases of negative existence.

Okay, so the other area that really worries may and this may be a more general case of the negative properties is the case of negative truths.

So it's true of this room that there's a chair in it.

Okay, so the statement there's a chair in this room seems to be true on what makes it true.

What makes it true is the chair.

So it's a physical object in the world, makes true the statement.

There's a chair in the room.

But here's the problem.

It's also true that there's no hippopotamus in this room, that there's no a giraffe in the room.

That Barrack Obama is not in the room and saw.

So I got all these negative truths, but what makes them true?

So in the case, the positive case, it was a physical object, the chair making it true that there's a chair in the room.

What is it, in the case of the negative truths that makes them true?

So this is an old problem.

Bertrand Russell discussed it.

I think it's one of the things that led him to fallout with Wittgenstein, but victims?

Stein wouldn't concede.

It was true that there wasn't a hippopotamus in the room, but I think maybe victims Stein had a point against Russell because it doesn't seem that there is anything in the world making it true, in which case we might start to doubt whether it is true.

What sort of thing could it be that would make those negative truth truth?

Here's one idea.

There's a kind of negative hit hippopotamus, or this room has a property of non hippopotamus containing all right, so if you'd be kind of invoking the existence off nothingness kind of non existence to explain this truth of their not being a hippopotamus in the room.

Now that seems to me to be getting into some very dodgy metaphysical territory.

If you start treating nothingness as if it's something you prepared to give it some kind of reality, you said a moment ago, there's not a hippopotamus in the room.

What makes that true?

Does it not make it true that you and I can conduct a search off this room, tow an agreed set of standards, not find a hippopotamus and then say it was true your statement was true?

And, yes, there are an infinite number of statements you could make theirs not to hit bottom I.

There's not three, but four, but they could all be proven true.

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with my logic there?

The problem we have in relation to this is that it's very hard to prove a negative.

Okay, now, in the case of the hippopotamus, you may feel a high degree of confidence that if you give my room a cursory inspection and failed to find hippopotamus than you may be pretty sure because the problem is that there could be a hidden hippopotamus or it could be something less conspicuous.

So the problem is that while I can find a chair and be confident that that verifies my statement, there's a chair in the room when it's a negative, when I'm trying to prove a negative.

The problem is that for all I know, I failed to find the thing in question, but it could have just escaped my notice.

Okay, so I know if there was a whole cluster of problems around these negatives, So another problem that really interested me was the so called cases of causation by absence.