josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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20 Jun '12 07:43:45 AM

'The social contract is nowhere in existence, because we do not will it; therefore the undeniable bonds between us are secured by our obedience to agreements and compacts that are being made among ourselves as individuals acting privately and in secret, not among ourselves as citizens acting openly on behalf of the polis. The logic of our position is that we are conspirators. If this is false, it is paranoid; if it is not, we are crazy.'

20 Jun '12 02:53:21 AM

'What gives the impression that Wittgenstein wants to deny anything? What in particular does he seem to deny? Not, as he says over and over again, that "The other has his sensations; I don't"; or anyway, not that "He may be suffering when I am not". He is not denying the truth of that assertion; but then that is not the assertion the skeptic stops with. The skeptic goes on to say something about what the other knows, and whether I can know it. And he means that to have the same obviousness as the fact that the other may be suffering and I not; indeed, one might say, he takes it to be the same undeniable fact. And that Wittgenstein does deny.'

A short way: ask, how do you know what the other knows? (As one asks a witness: why am I supposed to trust what you say? What ever gave you any knowledge of so-and-so anyway? Or using a word that Cavell and Austin favor: what put you in a position to know that?)

18 Jun '12 11:20:44 PM

The difference between going home in a car to sleep with your date, and going home with your date on the bus, same reason.

18 Jun '12 11:17:29 PM

One of my most precipitous trips home dragged on forever: that night that we snuck an awful lot of wine from the storage closet. Unable to ride it out, I had to bang on the back door and holler insistently to the driver who wouldn't let me trample over the little snow fence set up in Como Park. As I spilled out the back door I voided the contents of my stomach all over the snow. The air the rest of the way home couldn't be cold enough.

18 Jun '12 11:07:44 PM

If you bus then you are probably a school district, a public transit company, a municipality. But there are those who 'bus it', even those who say transitively that they are gonna bus it over to the, from the to the, in from the, until they get their, because it's.

18 Jun '12 11:01:01 PM

'walking to and from various buses and places to be in between the buses'

18 Jun '12 10:59:14 PM

Buses where the routes are colors seem friendly.

18 Jun '12 10:58:18 PM

On boozier holidays they give you rides for free, not trips.

18 Jun '12 10:57:19 PM

Metro Transit calls my rides trips. But half of them take me home. I'm not taking a trip home. I'm just going there.