[WikiEN-l] Little Napoleans

[Ken Arromdee]

On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
> Actually, I've been brooding about this topic since it came up last  
> year, and I've been troubled by the meta-question:
> 
> WHY is "the sky is blue" taken as the emblematic unchallengeable  
> fact, since it's not even close to being true?
> 
> I think the answer is that we've been brainwashed by being _told_ in  
> elementary school that "the sky is blue," and we continue to believe  
> it as having some quality of magical truth to it, even though we can  
> see with our own eyes that it is false.

No, the answer is that some phrases are not meant to express universal
statements just because the literal words of the phrase don't include any
qualifiers.  "The sky is blue" doesn't mean "the sky is always blue, every
single place".  If I tell you that caviar is expensive, are you *really*
going to claim that I'm therefore denying the possibility that some store
could be going out of business and holding a 90% off sale on caviar?

It's like the joke about the programmer who read a bottle of shampoo saying
"lather, rinse, repeat" and died unable to get out of the infinite loop.

There's nothing wrong with the statement that the sky is blue, only with
people who insist on interpreting such statements in a boneheadedly literal
manner without comprehending them.