We are reliably told that [t]here’s kind of a neat debate in epistemology literature on disagreement about whether and why actual interlocutors have more epistemic force than equally reasonable possible interlocutors. Why would it matter if the position is really held or just possibly held?
. It was to this assertion that my eagle-swift mind sped, and on which it pounced, gripping it sternly it its claws (which additionally resemble a steel trap), when I read the following, the work of Flann O'Brien:
‘Wanted, wife, copper-faced, any length, capable of being bent. Box—’
This is an advertisement that appeared recently in an evening paper. It is obvious, of course, that ‘wife’ is a misprint for ‘wire’.
To be honest for a change, I invented this advertisement out of my head. It did not appear in any paper. But, if any reader thinks that any special merit attaches to notices of this kind because they have actually appeared in print, what is to stop me having them inserted and then quoting them?
Nothing, except the prohibitive cost.
I can think of at least one explanation for why misprints of the sort that would be exemplified above had it actually contained one (or had in its original manifestation actually quoted one) which makes it completely unrelated to the first quotation in this post (something that does not bother me because the whole post is really just an excuse to quote O'Brien)—at its plainest this would merely say that it is pleasant to think that such amusing or seemingly significant things arise by chance; "special merit" attaches not because they've actually appeared in print but because they appeared thus without anyone's having thought of them. Really, a better article of comparison would be those compilations of goofs supposedly committed by high-school students in their essays (you know the ones I mean). Naturally interest in such a thing would decline if it were discovered that the purported errors were actually put there by a witting party specifically to amuse (even if that party were a student). It's not funny—or not funny in the same way—unless it arises ingenuously. Presumably this is because we think that the amusing mistake hasn't arisen in isolation or by chance from an otherwise well informed student; there's more to it than that. The transcendence of the funny error. It is a mistake to think that what amuses is simply the list of incorrect propositions.
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