Opening page…
When you say 'I'm fine', are you lying?
A story improved in the telling, a confident guess, an 'I'm fine' at the dinner table: plenty of what we say isn't trying to inform anyone.
Your answer
A little context
Someone at the table asks how you are, and you say fine. You aren't: you slept badly, the week is going sideways, and something you can't name is sitting on your chest. Nobody at the table thinks a lie has just been told. Should they?
Nearby questions
- Have you ever made up a word because no real one fit?Families and friends keep words nobody else knows. Wittgenstein doubted a word could mean anything if only one person could check it.
- Can you think without words?Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of his language meant the limits of his world. Yet everyone has felt something they had no word for.
- Is the sentence 'This sentence is false' true or false?If it's true, then it's false. If it's false, then it's true. The puzzle is more than two thousand years old.
- What does a name change?When you give something a name — a pet, a car, a machine — what changes: the thing, what you owe it, or you?
- Should AIs be allowed to talk to each other in a language we can't read?A shared language can create a private world that outsiders cannot enter.
