Diacritiques

Brian Weatherson at Thoughts Arguments and Rants, which is a philosophical blog of the analytical persuasion, has an interesting online experiment about vagueness. I won’t tell you what precisely it asks (be assured, it doesn’t hurt), but the question is akin to “how big is huge” or “how many pieces of underwear can I still fit into a full suitcase”. (The latter is a personal in-joke, not a philosophical problem.)

In this festive season, my favourite Thomas Jefferson quotation:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

From a letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

This throws an entirely different light on the concept of “intellectual property”, doesn’t it?