Suppose you were young again and had just pulled your old pickup off the road to help fix a flat tire. What would you make of this? The old fellow who was struggling with the spare thought his tire — pronounced “tar” in East Texas — had gone flat because of some offense he’d committed against heaven.
It’s a tale that illustrates a point Wittgenstein made about the way we use language in talking about deeply held beliefs.
The old man saw a flat tire and believed it had been caused by an act of retribution. It was punishment for some misdeed or sin.
I looked at the ancient tires and suspected the laws of physics were at work.
The old fellow and I couldn’t agree on the laws of causation.
We could talk about the weather — it was hot, and we got hotter changing the tire.
But we couldn’t even talk about something as ordinary as a tire. If we had tried to talk about the causes of common political problems, we’d have been so lost we might have been funny.
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