ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of things about entities, pseudo-entities, reality, and the sorcery of words. In a sense the entities of history are pseudo-entities; they are known by hearsay. The evidence for them tends to be persuasive and overcomes our doubts. In the first case the language fools us, in the second case the fraudulent word-coiner does: it is unlikely that any of the bottled hair-restorers ever restored hair or that consciousness-expanding was quite what it pretended to be. It occurs with its basic meaning in a sentence like the author has earned his wage and he expect us to pay it this is 'to merit as compensation'. So when the 'giant bar' shrank from eight to six ounces, and from six to five, the manufacturer reassured the public with impeccable logic: 'We reduced the size because we didn't want to increase the price'.
