passim
…the continual discover of fresh types of nonsense, unsystematic though their classification and mysterious though their explanation is too often allowed to remain, has done on the whole nothing but good. Yet we, that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we are prepared to admit we talk… 1
Avoiding the news again, with another cup of strong tea, and thinking about Descartes’s stove-heated room and Wittgenstein, in the aery of an artillery lookout, contemplating what one could say about the existence of a stove. Imagine being concerned about the statement ‘there is a stove in the other room’; if it is winter, perhaps, or if one needs to do some cooking, but the stove (or table or lamp or importunate visitor) always seems to be considered outside of context, outside of time – where of course it does not exist, if in fact it could be said to have any existence at all.
I actually find the statement ‘the stove in the other room is still lit’ more problematic as a statement, its truth value more troubling, particularly when I have just locked the door to the apartment.
- Note, however, that it is only a limit on the amount that we or they, that is, even philosophers, are willing to admit that they talk, not the actual amount that they actually do talk, which would perhaps be quantified rather differently, if one cared to quantify such things. Which I don’t.[↩]