My Take | That funny business about Taiwan and the US
- A news report saying Xi Jinping thinks America wants to set a trap for mainland China to attack the island should make us all sleep better at night
Stop me if you have heard this one before. There is this grammar joke about pronouns.
A boy is daydreaming in class. The English teacher notices. Thinking he can’t possibly know the answer and she will have her gotcha moment, she asks him to cite three examples of a pronoun.
Surprised, he replies, “What, who, me?”
I read about this joke in a book about the stock market. The moral of the story, as the author tells it, is that you can pick the right stock for entirely wrong reasons. You just luck out, though you can always pretend to be a genius.
Put another way, this one more epistemological, there is no way you can really know for sure that you pick the right stock for the right reason. In the same way, you can’t really know for sure the boy who was supposedly daydreaming didn’t know the answer and just blurted out the right one serendipitously. Maybe he really did know the answer and had a didactic sense of humour, who knows?
As a lifelong student of philosophy, I believe it was thinking about deep issues like that joke and losing money in the stock market which led philosopher and psychologist William James to come up with his brand of pragmatism, America’s greatest contribution to the Western philosophical tradition.