Philosophy, Really, Is A Kind of Therapy

I'm sorry everyone, but it is late, and I have discovered that R.A. and I can more than handle a fifth on our own. And you are all asleep right now. So I have to do this.

§354: The fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but symptoms. We say, for example: "Experience teaches that there is rain when the barometer falls, but it also teaches that there is rain when we have certain sensations of wet and cold, or such-and such visual impressions." In defence of this one says that these sense-impressions can deceive us. But here one fails to reflect that the fact that the false appearance is precisely one of rain is founded on a definition.

OK - the best that I can, at this moment provide, is that it is not the sense-impressions that deceive us but instead it is our not understanding how the word "experience" is used. It's a kind of a trick, a sleight of hand, that makes us think that the experience of watching the barometer drop is in someway comparable to watching wet, cold, droplets fall from the sky, insofar as both are (somehow) evidence of the fact that it is raining.

OK - the bottle of bourbon is starting to empty, and I think that I understand the difficulty in caring bout the difference between drops of water and barometers and vampires and vampire slayers. The existence of the latter proves the existence of the former. But, I continue to contend, the one cannot exist without the other.

The question is: In what sense does the barometer count as evidence for the fact that it rained last night, and in what sense does the fact that water fell from the sky count as evidence that it rained last night?

One night I was laying down. I heard mama and papa talking. I heard papa tell mama, "Let that boy boogie-woogie." And I felt so good. And I went on boogie-woogie just the same.