In a word, the difference between a duck is: substance. That’s the word philosophers used back in the time before the dinosaurs to say that something was there. Elon Musk eventually came along and gifted us humans with jetpacks and flamethrowers and we all joined forces to melt the dinosaurs’ faces off. It was then that the philosophers had a change of heart and decided “matter” was better, cleaner, or at least less pretentious as a way to describe the same stuff referred to by “substance.” The decision was objected to by all the usual suspects, including those two or three philosophers who had intended to count both anti-matter and that chthonic weirdness that was most definitely NOT matter they had discovered just a few days before among That Which Should be Studied, but they decided to keep their mouths shut upon remembering that they’d told no one and now here we are.
Analytic philosophy tends to approach language in a formulaic and mathematical fashion. It’s the kind of thinking one might expect from a man whose intent is to simplify language as much as possible so as to maintain clarity to the utmost degree. If objective reality—that which would be left remaining, were all human experience to be removed—is in some basic sense static and unchanging, many of the problems in philosophy may very well be due to misunderstandings and the lack of clarity in the language being used. I happen to think this approach is fundamentally mistaken in a number of ways, but it is worth engaging in such methodologies to see what these undeniably brilliant philosophers concluded AND for the purpose of answering a question such as this.
Within mathematics, the directive to simplify equations often results in numbers being added together, subtracted from each other, or otherwise consolidated. For example, before simplification, an equation might read:
10+4x+7y+0=43
For the purpose of illustrating the way I see and interpret the original question, I will translate the alphanumeric equation using words used in common language as opposed to those usually confined to mathematics, such as “plus” and “are”:
“Ten and four X and seven Y and nothing are forty-three.”
The simplified alphanumeric equation would be:
4x+7y=33
Translated:
“Four X and seven Y are thirty-three.”
I bolded “and nothing” in the translated equation before simplification and removed it in the simplified translation to illustrate the superfluous nature of such phrases in mathematics. Using analytic philosophy’s mathematical approach to language, the question I see is: “What’s the difference between a duck and nothing?” It is merely simplified. The only other possible answer as I see it is to get the nothing that comes from subtracting a duck from itself or comparing/contrasting the duck to that which is not there in between it, and “nothing” isn’t at all an interesting point to make, is it?
With care,
~ Grigori