I.
It is raining
—I believe that it is raining, but it is not.
—You believe that it is raining and assert that it is not?
—Yes.
I believe that it is raining but I know that I am mistaken.
—How do you know?
—That is not the issue. The issue is: I believe that
it is raining
But I am wrong.
—Who says that you are wrong?
—I do.
—But if you are wrong to believe that it is raining,
If you know that you are wrong to believe that it is raining
How can you believe that it is raining?
I need a straight answer.
—Is it raining?
—No.
—You see!
—I see that it is not raining. But I do not see how you can
Say that you believe that it is raining
And how you can
At the same time say that this belief is mistaken. I
cannot
Believe it.
—I believe that I believe it is raining and that I know
it is not.
—Fine.
—If I believe that I believe what I believe, I believe it.
—Fine.
—No one believes that and at the same time that not.
—That what? that what not?
—Whatever: that it is raining, for example.
—Go on.
—If I believe that I believe wrongly that it is raining,
In other words if I believe that it is raining even though it
is not the case that it is raining,
It follows that I believe that I believe it is raining
And at the same time that it is not the case that it is raining.
And it thus follows that I simultaneously believe that it is raining
And that it is
Not. But given that no one has ever at the same time
believed that it was raining and that it was not, it is
impossible that I believe that I believe that it is raining
Knowing full well that it is not.
—To be sure.
—And yet I believe it.
—You believe what?
In any event, it is raining.
II.
The past
She said to him: “It is very nice out.”
Therefore
It was nice out.
If it is nice out, it is not necessarily very nice out.
If she had said “it is nice out”
could he have understood that she had, as it were,
potentially
said
“it is nice out, but it is not very nice out”?
No.
“It is nice out” would not have signalled any reservations on her part.
But neither would he have heard in her
“it is nice out”
(if she had said “it is nice out”)
“it is nice out, it is even very nice out.”
“It is nice out”
would not have signalled
any insistance
on her part.
All the same if, having said “it is nice out”
(which had not been the case)
she had added “it is even very nice out”
would this have meant that she thought
that by simply saying
“it is nice out” she had not been precise enough,
that she had not sufficiently asserted
how nice the weather was?
Without doubt.
But could she have said
“it is very nice out, it is even very nice out”?
No.
Why?
It is simply not said. If she had said
“it is even very nice out” after having said
“it is very nice out”
she would have applied the qualifier “even” to the utterance
“it is very nice out.” But when one says
“it is very nice out” in no case does one say
it is nice out but not very nice,
which added on to the utterance “it is nice out”
would be as unlikely as “it is even very nice out”
and it follows that this “even” cannot apply
to the utterance
“it is nice out”.
—Really?
—And was it nice out?
—It was.
—translated by Richard Sieburth and Françoise Gramet