Ashton's a playwright.
Half the fun of a post by Ash is coming across new words; another half is drawing a mental 4-D sentence diagram; and the final half is seeing that pre-boomer insight come shining through. :-)
Ashton challenges us, and that's a good thing. I'll bet he's read quite a bit of [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein|Wittgenstein]. Now he was an interesting case - he wrote in short, but extremely difficult to understand sentences (IMO, anyway). See, e.g., his [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus|Tractatus Logico Philosophicus]:
There are seven main propositions in the text. These are:
1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of atomic states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: [image|http://en.wikipedia.org/math/01a3cf5f91211db95ef402b4bd20508b.png||||]. This is the general form of a proposition.
7. What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.
Ashton's prose fits very well with what he wants to convey.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
