I'm reminded of how Ludwig Wittgenstein opens his Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus:
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. I hated that thought initially, but I came around to realize that being analytical requires the quantification of everything. The set of prepositions makes total sense when you think about it. It's difficult to describe where my mind is on this without a hasty analogy... a deaf person doesn't know that a trumpet is loud, but that doesn't mean that the trumpet doesn't have the property of being "loud". The issue is that the property is unobserved (or unobservable). It retains the property, but that person hasn't observed that fact. If the fact is, indeed, unobservable and whether it is loud or not loud makes no difference to a deaf person, then the pragmatic definition is that a trumpet's sound holds no meaning. Applying that to politics, if corporate tax breaks do not affect the poorest populations either positively or negatively, then the pragmatic definition of a tax break to them means nothing. They're like a deaf person listening in on a trumpet concerto. In essence, then, it's as if government and the musician are doing nothing at all. Then again, I may just be projecting my thoughts onto Wittgenstein. The Tractatus was almost incomprehensible at points. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
