PRESUPPOSITIONS

A certain mental patient was convinced that he was dead, so he was committed to the care of a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had the man read an anatomy book and watch films to show him that dead men do not bleed. Then he took him into a room full of cadavers, where the man saw for himself that dead men do not bleed. “All right, I’m convinced, dead men don’t bleed,” he said.

Then the doctor took a pin and poked the man, and a tiny drop of blood appeared. “Well, what do you know,” the man responded. “Dead men do bleed after all.”1071

“Every period of intellectual history has some dogma which is regarded at the time not as dogma, but merely as what is evident” (James Cornman, Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction [New York: Macmillan, 1982]).1072