“Today, one of the world’s largest collections of Nazi propaganda sits in a climate-controlled warehouse at Fort Belvoir, in northern Virginia. Much of it is virulent; most of it is never seen by the public.”
“Speakers take a lot for granted,” write David I. Beaver, Bart Geurts, and Kristie Denlinger in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “That is, they presuppose information. As we wrote this, we presupposed that readers would understand English. We also presupposed as we wrote the last sentence…that there was a time when we wrote it, for otherwise the fronted phrase ‘as we wrote this’ would not have identified a time interval. Further, we presupposed that the sentence was jointly authored, for otherwise ‘we’ would not have referred. And we presupposed that readers would be able to identify the reference of ‘this’, i.e., the article itself. And we presupposed that there would be at least two readers, for otherwise the bare plural ‘readers’ would have been inappropriate.” It goes on like that for several thousand words. Philosophers ain’t what they used to be, I reckon.
Bugs Bunny turned 80 last year.
Random fact of the day: There are roughly 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 169.518 octillion) possible ways to play the first 10 moves in a game of chess. Which explains how I keep finding new ways to lose.
