3 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. the science of meaning (semantics) is necessarily much more complex than semantic primitives.

      semantics is not only semantic primitive, it is how it got the meaning it has as a current symantic primitve.

  2. Oct 2022
    1. It was Ranke, too, who set the historian’s task: to find out wie eseigentlich gewesen ist, what really happened, or, literally, how itreally was. His goal is one that will remain forever just beyond ourgrasp for reasons I explained in a “Note on Sources” in The Guns ofAugust (a paragraph that no one ever reads but I think is the bestthing in the book). Summarized, the reasons are that we who writeabout the past were not there. We can never be certain that we haverecaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is to stay withinthe evidence.