Introducing Dr Tristan Grøtvedt Haze

Tristan Grøtvedt Haze joined the University of Melbourne in 2022 as a Lecturer (Teaching Specialist) in Philosophy. His first book, Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity, was recently published by Routledge. Tristan specialises in metaphysics and logic, and teaches across a number of undergraduate Philosophy subjects. He also enjoys some rather funny extracurricular activities, which he explores together with current PhD candidate Henry Dobson in this interview.

Tristan, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.

Thanks, Henry. Thanks for having me.

You’ve spent many years living in Sydney before moving to Melbourne to take up this position. How are you enjoying Melbourne life compared to living in Sydney? And what’s one thing you’ll miss most about Sydney life?

Oh, yeah, really, really enjoying it so far. I like the flatness of it for bike-riding purposes! But, having said that, I think I’m going to miss the hills of Sydney – a little bit of undulation, a little bit of variety along the vertical axis – I’m going to miss that.

Are you nearby campus, and does that mean you can cycle to campus?

Oh, yeah, it’s like something like six kilometres, and not to brag or anything, but I think I can do that in about fifteen minutes.

That’s flying! Great. Well, this year is an exciting year for you because you have a new book coming out with Routledge, which is titled Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity.

Is there a core thesis to the book? And, if so, what is it?

I should probably explain some of the component ideas before getting onto the thesis.

There’s this idea of necessity versus contingency. And the idea is that there are a bunch of true things you can say about the world – true propositions or true statements. And the idea is that they fall into these two categories: there are the necessarily true ones, that are true and would have been true no matter how the world turned out, versus the contingent truths, which are true, but could have been otherwise.

For example, we’re sitting here having this interview – we could have done it at a different time or we could have just not done it. So, it’s true to say that we’re here now but it’s contingently true, as opposed to a statement like ‘Bachelors are unmarried’, or perhaps ‘2 + 2 = 4’ – that’s true, and it didn’t just turn out or happen to be true – it’s necessarily true. So that’s the topic of the book. And the main thesis in the book is that we’re able to tell the difference between those two kinds of truths, in part, just by reflecting on the meanings of the words involved.

The traditional view was that we can know necessary truths just by thinking about it. There have been a lot of challenges to this idea in philosophy for the past few decades, especially in the work of Saul Kripke. And I’m trying to reinstate a version of the traditional view.

This is sometimes called modal rationalism. The idea is that we can know modal facts like what’s necessary versus what’s contingent just by thinking about it – not by empirical investigation, but by a kind of philosophical reflection on what’s going on. And furthermore, I think that we can characterise that as a kind of reflecting on meaning – reflecting on the meanings of the terms involved.

Take, for example, the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 – it’s something about my understanding of that proposition and how it works that enables me to know that, if it’s true, it’s necessarily true. So, I have to defend that. And in the course of defending that, I have to tell a story about linguistic meaning, as well. So, I have some ideas in the book about linguistic meaning and its nature.

A subsidiary thesis has to do with what I call the doctrine of flexible granularity. The question here is, what if you have two occurrences of expressions? Do they mean the same or not? Do they mean the same thing? Are they synonymous? Or do they mean different things?

Telling a story about that has been a big stumbling block for the way of thinking about meaning that I want to develop. If you can’t tell a story about what happens when you’ve got two meanings versus just one meaning twice over, you might think you don’t have a coherent idea of meaning. And I’m trying to undermine that thought by saying: no, that’s inherently flexible – because part of the way our concept of meaning works, and our concept of ‘meaning the same as’ works, is that it’s context sensitive.

In one context, it might be correct to say that these two expressions mean the same thing. But if you’re discussing it from a different point of view, you might distinguish them in meaning, you might have a more fine-grained way of individuating the meanings – so, that’s a subsidiary thesis in the book.

That’s great. Thanks for that exposition.

Those must be tricky lines to draw, because I imagine there must be a lot of nuance; of course, language can be very flexible and malleable in terms of how we comprehend and describe and explain the world. Do you find that there’s a definition to meaning? Do you have a strict position towards meaning, which enables you to draw those lines? Or do you just differentiate according to different languages, and other ways of understanding meaning?

Well, yeah, it’s funny you say that – it reminds me of this idea that it is a context-sensitive matter, that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, necessarily, to the question, do these two occurrences of expressions mean the same or do they not mean the same? The idea that that could be flexible is not entirely new. People have been throwing that around in print for as far back as Hilary Putnam in the 1970s, drawing on ideas from Quine and from Wittgenstein.

But I think when people make that move, it’s a little bit too easy – it sounds too easy to just say, “oh, it’s flexible”. And it has a kind of anti-theoretical bent, which has put some people off.

I’m trying to back this up with a systematic account of a way of thinking about meaning, and a way of getting precise about this kind of variation that we see, so that it doesn’t have that anti-theoretical flavour anymore. I think that’s the way to actually get this idea – which has been quite plausible for a long time now – that’s the way to get it to stick. So I go into that in the book.

But yeah, I do have a general conception of what meaning is. And I distinguish two factors: an internal aspect, which is something like the way we use the expression, sort of like the patent of its use, or the role it plays in our thinking and speaking. That’s one aspect.

And then there’s the external aspect, which has to do with what’s actually out there in the world corresponding to our words. You need both, arguably.

Great. You taught philosophy at the University of Sydney and are now teaching here at the University of Melbourne. What do you enjoy most about teaching undergraduate philosophy?

Oh, God, I love it. I’ve loved it from the get-go.

My teaching is kind of two-pronged, because I teach logic, and I also teach other kinds of philosophy, like first-year philosophy and a critical and creative thinking subject. And I like them in different ways. They’re kind of a nice antidote to each other, if you like – that’s a bit of a negative way of putting it, but you know, in logic, it’s so delightful that questions arise and then actually get resolved, like during a tutorial or whatever, you can pose and definitively answer questions. And, of course, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen in the rest of philosophy, roughly speaking – so I like having both in my life.

And, yeah, it’s just a dream come true to be working doing this, talking about this kind of stuff that I find so fascinating. I love the idea of being part of this tradition, passing on this stuff and enriching the minds of people who find it interesting, and perhaps even helping to bring about the philosophers of the future, passing it on. I just think it’s wonderful.

Do you also find that you learn from the students as well? Do you experience, you know, fresh ideas in the classroom, which take you by surprise?

Oh, no, it’s strictly a one-way street. I just tell them what – … no, no, of course! Yeah. Exactly!

And, you know, discussion in tutes really helps with presenting ideas, coming up with new combinations and posing questions that you haven’t posed or maybe coming back to the beginning, so to speak. When you do a PhD and get involved in research, you get deeper and deeper into some particular area and I think teaching helps you keep sight of the forest as opposed to the trees. So yeah, I’ve definitely learned a lot from my students reacting in ways I didn’t expect and posing questions.

You also write on the topics of metaphysics and logic and are the editor of the ‘Metaphysical Necessity’ category at PhilPapers. What are the major debates currently happening in this category?

One of them is something I alluded to with the main thesis of the book about the distinction between necessary and contingent truths. Is there any role for something like conceptual analysis or a priori thinking in the armchair, some kind of distinctive philosophical, a priori input into our knowledge about this question of what’s necessary versus contingent? Or is it in some cases just irreducibly empirical? There are some people who think that. There are particular examples which suggest that, where it’s not clear whether you can isolate a factor that is the a priori factor, or the reflecting-on-meaning factor, if you like. And that’s a big debate.

I think it’s fair enough that people doubt that but I think I’ve come up with a correct factorisation. And I think I’ve shown in my book that there is such a factor. But there are people on both sides of that debate, and I’m tempted to say that my opponent, so to speak, is almost maybe dominant today.

Another big debate is over what kind of ideas you want to use to shed light on things like necessity. There’s this growing approach in recent years to appeal to something like essence – the metaphysical idea of essence – like, the essence of you is what it is about you that makes you you; or the idea of powers – the idea of objects having powers. These kinds of ideas are sometimes used to give an account of necessity, but they themselves are quite heavy-duty metaphysical ideas.

Prior to that, there was this tradition of trying to explain modality, like possibility and necessity, trying to explain that in less heavy-duty terms – to try to reduce possibility and necessity to something more just to do with how things actually are. And now this more recent trend is coming at it the other way, coming at it with, if you like, even more heavy-duty ideas and saying: “Well, if you embrace these, then you get necessity as well.”

I haven’t been too taken with that because I don’t think it’s wrong, but I think there is a possibility to explain more from underneath perhaps … or not, not just appealing to essence and then explaining necessity in terms of that. So that’s a trend I’ve perhaps found a little bit alien to my thinking. But it’s definitely a trend.

Having said that, there was this trend of trying to fully explain away modality, possibility and necessity, trying to analyse modal concepts, without using any modal concepts – like: “Tell me what it is to be necessary, and don’t use any modal concept when you explain it to me.” That was a big obsession in analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Some readers might know David Lewis, who believes in all these possible worlds as real, concrete worlds, and he uses them to give a reductive analysis of modality, to say: “Well, all it means to say something’s possible, it just means that it happens in one of these worlds that I believe in” – that’s what Lewis would say.

So that’s a reductive analysis of modality but, of course, you have to buy into the idea that there are all these possible worlds, and that when we say something’s possible, that we can analyse that as saying, “Oh, it actually happens in one of these worlds” – which, you know, is really a minority view. It’s kind of this crazy view that happens to be very well defended, and it’s got a huge following, and it takes up a lot of the landscape, because it’s a fascinating view and it’s very hard to say why it’s wrong.

But I think that obsession with reductive analysis of modality, explaining it without using any modal concepts – I think that’s finally falling by the wayside a little bit, and leaving more room for an interesting explanation that’s not reductive. There’s still plenty you can say about the notion of necessary truths, the ones that could not have been otherwise – you don’t have to totally avoid all modal concepts in your explanation in order to say something interesting about that.

I’m not committed to avoiding all modal concepts in my explanation. I think just that possibility of thinking about it that way, is something that maybe was a little bit obscured in the past by that obsession that everyone seemed to have with reducing the modal to the non-modal.

Right, yeah. And, of course, mathematics is typically seen as being, I guess, the space of a priori knowledge, with examples, like two plus two equalling four as a necessary truth, that it couldn’t have been otherwise. Do you find that a lot of it comes down to mathematical thinking in that sense, in terms of trying to explain the world with a solid foundation, or is it moving away from that abstract groundwork and into a more flexible grounding, if you will?

Well, it’s funny that you mention the ‘2 + 2 = 4’ example, because that’s one of the central kinds of examples of necessary truths. But part of the trouble with all this is that a priori, can we just know what’s necessarily true, just by thinking about it? Part of the pressure on this idea comes from these other examples, which are very different from ‘2 + 2 = 4’.

It might be worth putting one on the table: there’s this idea of identity statements. Take an example where you have two different names for the same object. The common example here is Hesperus and Phosphorus, which are both names for Venus. Hesperus is the name for Venus in the evening and Phosphorus is the name that’s been applied to that same object when it’s seen in the morning.

And, so, there’s this question, is Hesperus Phosphorus? Or are they two different things? The philosopher Saul Kripke argued that identity statements involving names, like ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, are necessarily true. Or if you’re worried that this might have been false if Hesperus/Phosphorus had not existed at all, change the example to ‘If Hesperus exists, Hesperus is Phosphorus’.

And Kripke argued: Well, look, that’s not a priori – you have to do a bit of astronomy. You know, it’s actually a very clever astronomical discovery that I think the Babylonians made. You have to do empirical work to know that – you can’t know that just by thinking about it. And yet given that it is the case, it could not have been otherwise.

So, the idea is: well, so maybe Hesperus isn’t Phosphorus, but we think it is. Suppose we’re right – suppose Hesperus really is Phosphorus. And that’s just the one thing here. Well, the idea is something like: well, could that have been otherwise? Could Hesperus have failed to be Phosphorus? And no, Kripke says, it couldn’t – I mean, there’s just one thing here after all, so it’s not as if there’s another possible world in which Hesperus and Phosphorus were distinct, because there’s just one thing here.

Now, that might sound wrong. There are all these possible misunderstandings that I don’t have time to go into. But read Kripke’s book Naming and Necessity if you’re interested.

So, there are these examples of necessary truths which you can’t know to be true a priori. Compare this to the example of ‘2 + 2 = 4’ – you can know that it’s true a priori, whereas with these other examples like ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, the sentence or the statement itself is not a priori. But you can still work out that if ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ true at all, then it’s necessarily true – that bit is a priori. That going from it’s true to, well, it’s actually necessarily, not just contingently true – that bit’s still a priori in the ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ case. But, and this is crucial, not all examples have this nice feature!

I won’t get too deep into the weeds, but there are some really tricky examples where this breaks down. So, you have to be a bit clever to maintain this idea that there is this a priori factor. I’ve had to develop a new analysis of the relevant type of necessity in order to isolate that factor.

Yeah, right. And, so, does that mean that the a posteriori necessity is where most of the truth can be found, then, if you’re using some empirical validation around certain claims, like Hesperus is Phosphorus, and, you know, using astronomy and other empirical means to verify the objects and their nature to a degree? Is that where the focus is, on that a posteriori space, as opposed to the a priori space? How do those two different things – the a priori, and the a posteriori – relate then?

You know, I guess it depends what you want to know about, what’s going on in the inquiry. So, maybe from the astronomer’s point of view, it doesn’t matter so much, right? We figured out that Hesperus is Phosphorus – great! That’s what we wanted to know – we can all go home.

But then the philosopher wants to do something else here. It goes back to the traditional idea of philosophy. Philosophy has this distinctive task of telling us what must be true, what is true in all possible worlds. For a philosopher, it’s not enough to just know that Hesperus is Phosphorus – you want to know if it’s necessarily true or not.

And, I guess, from a higher order or a more reflective point of view, you want to have some understanding of how you get to know stuff like that. So, that area is sometimes called modal epistemology. For example, we care about what’s necessarily true, what’s true in all possible worlds – but how do we figure that stuff out? So that’s part of what my project is directed at.

Part of the story for how we get to know that is empirical and part of it is a priori. Part of it is this more distinctively philosophical bit, which in a way is in danger of being made invisible. It’s hard to see for theoretical reasons how exactly that distinctively philosophical bit works. And so that’s where my book gets started, in clarifying and telling a story about that.

 

Very good. Okay, moving on: you’re obviously a philosopher by day, but you’re also a stand-up comedian by night. How long have you been performing stand-up comedy? And what do you enjoy most about it?

Well, I’ve been doing it probably long enough that it doesn’t do me any favours to admit it – like, five or six years. So, I’ve had plenty of time to become funny and, if I’m not, then I’m just not, really – but I love it.

When it goes well, it’s exhilarating. It’s just wonderful fun. When it goes badly, it’s bloody awful. But that’s the price you pay. So, I love that about it. But, also, I just find it a fascinating art form because it’s so simple in a way, the format of it – you know, a person with a microphone.

That’s interesting, because I always thought it was a very complex art form, in the sense that, you know, everyone presumes that you’re going to be funny, and then you’ve got to work with this audience, so it’s very dynamic, and you’ve got to somehow work the audience towards your aim of pleasing them.

You’re absolutely right! I don’t want to just say it’s a simple art form and stop there. I think it’s what you say. It’s the contrast between those two features: it’s simple in format, in the sense that it’s just a person with a microphone, more or less. But then, within that, of course, it’s so complicated, what happens within that format is endlessly complicated. Even if you’re doing the same material, it’s different every time. And each crowd is different. And, so, there’s endless complexity and stuff to reflect on there.

And I think that, side by side with the simplicity of the format, there’s something lovely about that; there’s something I really like about that. And maybe there’s something similar there with something like logic, to take another of my passions, that’s totally different. With logic, you just need a pen and paper and you can do logic. There’s not a lot of apparatus. It’s quite simple. And, yet, then this whole world opens up – maybe there’s an analogy there with what I like about stand-up.

Well, that, of course, leads me to ask, can you please tell us a funny joke?

Yeah, I don’t know if I can tell you a funny joke. I’m certainly not prepared to do one of mine in this setting.

But here’s a joke that I heard from this old bugger in a pub who was like, you know, carrying on a bit. I’d never met him, but he told me this joke and I think it’s sort of philosophical in a way.

The joke is: what’s red and invisible?

No tomatoes.

So that’s a joke.

Very good. Well, that segues well into my next question: does academic philosophy influence your comedy? And do you see comedy as a form of philosophical expression?

Oh, God, no! No to the last question. The way I do comedy is very silly and I probably get the big words and things out of my system when I do philosophy. And I’m pretty silly – I’m pretty simple in a way, when I do stand-up.

But I do think there’s a kind of underlying way of thinking that informs both comedy and philosophy for me – mucking around with the way things are presented, or the way things are framed. So, I think there’s a common source to them both. Let’s say some weird thing happens in our language or in our thought – you could make a joke about it, or you could try to actually figure out what’s going on and think really hard about it, and that’s philosophy. And maybe the joke would highlight the phenomenon too.

In practice, I keep them pretty separate in my mind when I do them. But I do feel like the kind of comedy I do reflects some of the same things about me that make me do philosophy. Yeah.

It’s interesting that you don’t think that the comedy is a form of philosophical expression or, at least, not in any sort of direct sense for yourself personally; but it seems like a lot of comedians do reveal these philosophical truths to us through comedy. And comedy seems to have this special ability to tell us hard truths about the world, which we otherwise don’t want to articulate for ourselves, or that we don’t read anywhere else, except in that domain of comedy, where the comedian, just by virtue of making us laugh, can punch us pretty hard with some truths. So, I would have thought, just from my own experience of watching comedians, that there is some ability to, I guess, express philosophy through comedy.

Absolutely! That’s true, I think. And, you know, comedy helps people make sense of the world. It deals with the things that are the same over generations, the eternal things about human life, but it also looks at the way the world is going and the way things are changing. I think people often get some relief from all this in comedy and it also helps people think things through. It’s fascinating also to see how podcasts and other new formats for comedy have become such a thing – this lets comedy be much richer than when it was all just done in clubs or sitcoms.

I guess why I disagreed so fully at first is that philosophy is about making it all explicit and laying it out in a literal way, and also a more theoretical abstract way, whereas with comedy, a lot of it is sort of between the lines, or it’s dealing with much more concrete concerns.

You also enjoy sketching and drawing. What role does art play in your life?

Yeah, well, I mean, I just like drawing. I did a lot of cartooning, you know, in high school and stuff, and I just try to keep going with that. And it’s one of those things I do have to keep going with. I suppose I’ve had off periods, but I think it’s something I’d like to continue . My drawings are quite, you know, they’re just sort of line drawn, I mostly just use a biro on a bit of paper. And I like the way that such a simple thing like that can almost sometimes show a way of looking at things. So, yeah, I find it very enjoyable and interesting.

Do you have a philosophical view on art and its meaning and purpose in life?

That goes beyond little line drawings – that’s a big one. I don’t, really. I mean, I’m not a philosopher of art, who’s developed ideas about that. I like doing art; I love art, and the arts, and I like practicing some of them, and maybe I don’t think about it too much, theoretically. I don’t know if that would interfere with doing it.

But I certainly think art has intrinsic value. I’m inclined to say that. I think it’s valuable for its own sake.

I’m also partial to this idea that I got from Brian Eno, who talks about how artworks, or art practices, provide little worlds in which to try things and experiment with things. You know, if you’re always just engaging with the real world, and doing serious real-world things, then there’s a limit to how much you can stuff up and try weird things that might not work, whereas the arts give us these little worlds that we can muck around in and try things. And that can also teach us about the rest of the world. I’m quite partial to that idea, I suppose.

Yeah, great. And what is the focus of your work in 2022?

There’s lots of exciting stuff coming up. I’m the coordinator and one of the lecturers for the first-year undergraduate subject, The Big Questions [PHIL10002].

And I’ve got a Critical and Creative Thinking subject [PHIL90021] for the Executive Master of Arts program. That was my first half of the year.

In the second half of the year, I’m teaching another first-year subject, The Great Thinkers [PHIL10003]. I want to drop the ‘The’, actually, and call it just ‘Great Thinkers’, because it’s not a definitive list of all the great thinkers.

And my Logical Methods subject [PHIL20030], which I taught for the first time last year. I’ve got that again, which is a delight – it’s one of my favourites. So that’s on the teaching front.

On the research front, I’ve got the book coming out, so I need to try to make sure it gets read.

And I’m working on some new stuff, some philosophy of logic stuff around the idea of logical monism versus pluralism. So here the question is, does this thing follow from these other things? You might think that’s just a yes/no matter – that’s, roughly speaking, logical monism. Logical pluralism says: well, there are different logics, and an argument might be valid in one logic and not valid in another.

I’ve got a paper in the works now where I’m arguing, not that monism is correct, but that it gets a bad press, because people think that if you’re a logical monist, then that just means logic’s all done and dusted, it’s finished – some existing logical system that someone’s worked out in a book or a paper is the full story about logic. I think it’s natural to think that that goes along with the monist viewpoint, and I’ve got some work trying to show that that’s not true at all. Even if you’re a logical monist, there’s the possibility of different notations in logic or different symbolisms, different ways of representing things. There’s plenty of room for new work in logic, even if you’re a monist of that kind.

It might be possible to take some existing logical system and take an argument in natural language or another language, and regiment it into logic notation, so that it kind of corresponds to the natural one. But that regimentation might be very drastic. And you might end up with some formulas that really are quite different, in shape and structure, from the original argument that you formalised.

So even if you can, in some sense, capture the validity of some argument, then that might leave – the way you’ve done it in your formulas – might leave something to be desired. So, there’s plenty of room for logicians to develop new notations and ways of representing logical form. And I think that the sky’s the limit there.

It’s weird, because a lot of interesting work these days in philosophical logic is working with existing logical languages – the formulas stay the same, they look the same, and all different kinds of interpretations or semantics or proof theories for them. I want to see more innovation in logic in the formulas themselves, like the actual notation – I think that’s an interesting place for innovation in logic. Anyway, you’ve got to stop me, but that’s what I’ll be doing this year.

Not at all! It’s very interesting. Just a quick question on notation: might it be that notation represents another dimension? Or that a different notation represents a different dimension, which enables another sort of angle of logic? Is that how the notations work? Because this is an interesting point around the innovation of logic, as you call it.

Yeah. Because we think in symbols, or we use notation to aid our thinking – we use a bit of paper. And it really matters how you make the representation – the same thing written differently will cognitively be very different. Just to make this slightly more concrete: there are these valid arguments involving adverbs. So adverbs, like ‘quickly’, for example, they have this characteristic logical behaviour. For example, if Socrates is walking quickly, it follows logically that Socrates is walking. So if you’re walking quickly, of course, you must be walking.

And if you put a negation in there, like a ‘not’, it goes the other way. So if Socrates is not walking, well, it follows from that, that he’s not walking quickly.

In some sense, the standard kind of logic that undergrads learn in philosophy can handle that. But the way it does it is by totally transforming the form of those sentences.

The dominant approach is due to Donald Davidson, and here you end up talking about events – you say ‘there was a walking event, and Socrates was involved and it was a quick one’. So, the quick adverb becomes a predicate, like, ‘this event was quick’, or something like that – very different from the way it actually happens in natural language.

I’ve done a bit of work developing a much more perspicuous, or clear notation for that, where the formulas look just like that, where you can see the adverb disappear or appear. And I think that’s a much better representation of those valid arguments that I gave, you know, about Socrates.

It’s not that you can’t shoehorn it into existing logical systems, but they cry out for more special treatment. And there’s tons of stuff like that. Natural language is just the beginning. There are all the possible ways of representing information, not just the sentences that we naturally utter – you know, diagrams, whatever.

Great. That’ll be fascinating to watch for – that sounds like great work ahead for you.

This brings us to our final question, and it loops back to the first question, in a way: Is there anything wrong or illogical about this proposition: “Necessarily, Melbourne is better than Sydney”?

Yeah, well, I think it’s probably wrong. I think it’s probably false. And that’s not because … I’m not saying that Melbourne is not better than Sydney. Let’s suppose that Melbourne is better than Sydney. Well, assuming that, what might be some of the reasons that Melbourne is superior to Sydney? What do you think?

We’ve got far superior coffee. Far superior art. We’ve got a richer cultural scene.

Okay. But could that not have been otherwise? Couldn’t things have turned out differently, so that the coffee was crap in Melbourne and the art was rubbish? Or maybe this might have been not so drastic – maybe the coffee could have just been slightly worse, right? For historical reasons – let’s say things went differently, and different people came to Melbourne at different times. And, you know, maybe in that alternative possible world, things could have gone a little bit better for coffee in Sydney, right?

So, I think because that’s possible, I’m happy to agree, for the sake of argument, that Melbourne is better than Sydney. But I don’t think it’s necessarily true.

So perhaps you’d swap ‘necessarily’ out for ‘possibly’?

Oh, possibly. Yeah, yeah, that’s easy. That’s a low bar. It’s certainly possible.

We’re not talking about epistemic possibility. We’re not saying: it could actually be better.

There is at least one possible world when Melbourne is better than Sydney. That’s clearly true, I reckon. And it might even be actually true. I’m happy with that as well. We could debate that. I don’t know – I don’t have a strong view about it. I want to like Melbourne because this is my home now.