Before the philosophy minor, there was one confidently incorrect answer.
Long before I was three credits short of a philosophy minor, I had already begun challenging accepted definitions of language.
I was 12, shy and awkward, in Catholic school, safely stationed in the back of the chorus during rehearsal for Aladdin. Roughly 70 kids were in the auditorium. Nuns and people of similar disposition were overseeing the production.
During a break, one of the kids up front asked Mrs. Frack:
“What’s a nom de plume?”
Everyone not anointed laughed for maybe five minutes.
And I went back to being shy and awkward in the rear of the chorus.
For approximately five minutes, I was Voltaire.
Meditations on Knowing Nothing
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
Socrates supposedly said that.
Although Socrates never wrote anything down, so we know he said it because Plato said he said it.
And Plato was obviously brilliant, but Plato also believed in Atlantis because, as far as I’m concerned, a witch in a cave told him about it.
So the evidentiary standard at the foundation of Western philosophy was apparently:
ALSO A WITCH TOLD ME ABOUT AN UNDERWATER CITY.”
Which honestly makes Socrates’ point stronger.
We really don’t know shit.