Bolton's big hit "How am I Supposed to Live without You" begins thus: "I could hardly believe it/When I heard the news today/I had to come and get it straight from you/They said you were leavin'/Someone swept your heart away/From the look upon your face I see it's true." That strikes me as a marvelous bit of story telling. The rest of the song, unfortunately, soon slips into standard-issue '80s ballad. But what exactly do I like about the above? The first line sets up the rest, pressing the listener to ask what was so unbelievable. We might already guess that a romantic disappointment was the hardly-believed thing, but we are steered subtly in another direction by "news". The narrator didn't hear gossip or "the word". He heard "the news". For many of us that suggests headlines or something broadcast. Then it turns out, not until the third line though, the first suspicion was accurate. I could hardly believe ...
Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?". I answered: The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge. Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off. Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent. He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts." As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing. It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real. A Hegel/Wittgenstein link? That is a different trick. You COULD try to see the movement from th...