2.56
There’s a polyphony of voices. Things don’t clamour towards our light; things light us up. We clamour towards mutual co-lighting. If a world is an ocean, it laps on the shore: there are edges upon which it crashes. There are different oceans, different seas; there are eddies, wisps of other worlds. Things say, “Look at things like this.”
‘But why should we accept this picture?’
— “Look at things like this.”
The principle of verification: Yes, statements often should be verifiable. Yet, verifiability, criteria, and methodologies derive their sense from their context. ‘There are three ducks there.’ Presumably we can check. But if this sentence occurs in a novel? It’s not then meaningless. There’s a kind of sense-making opened by the novel, and hence a way to see if it is (or could be) the case or not.
But what if we hear, ‘There are gods in that tree?’ How do we verify it? We ask she who said it; she can give reasons. ‘I don’t see any gods there!’ What does this tell us about our criteria? Is it the case, then, that her criteria (which necessarily go beyond her as an individual, for criteria are never confined to one person) are wrong? ‘I don’t see it!’ – But does she have a way to verify her claim?
‘So, you’re painting a picture and then asking us—‘look at things like this’—to see if the picture resonates as true?’
In a way. Some of the reasons for accepting the picture are within the picture itself. And yet, it isn’t a picture or a representation of something. It’s as though I’m gesturing towards mountain peaks,[1] or holding up a coloured transparency that reveals certain patterns in the things behind it.
– Not that there’s anything wrong with the image of painting: it just depends on how we think about it.
[1] Hardy, “Mathematical Proof,” p. 18, quoted in Zwicky, W&M, RH64. See §2.3.