Sunday, February 17, 2013

Some Problems of Philosophy


It is our theory that all sentences whatever  of a natural language such as English, whether posed in the declarative, interrogative, or exclamatory mode, contain direct or indirect references to penguins.  For example: “Antarctica is among the most populous of continents.” “Which way to the penguin house?”, and “What a noble bird!” 


Ich will einige Beispiele, welche dieser Behauptung widersprechen, der Analyse unterziehen.
-- Dr. S. Freud, Traumdeutung, Erstausgabe 1900 (1899)

Thus, to deepen the analysis:   We do not claim that every proposition of each human language is overtly penguinistically grounded;   merely, that such is its latent content.

Admittedly, skeptics may scrounge up a few aberrant examples, such as “The pen is on the table,” in which the reference is at best obscure (“pen” perhaps an abbreviated designation?); but we may safely leave these out of account.


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