To say that X is a pirate is a metaphoric heuristic, intended to persuade a policymaker that the in-depth analysis can be skipped and the desired result immediately attained… Claims of piracy are rhetorical nonsense.
But the height of absurdity was attained with the claim that he was a great orator.
If an acceptable fit is attained, one can claim that the configuration of electric currents usefully represents the physical current system.
One may read the very first sentence of the Star—"All knowing of the All begins in death, the fear of death"—as a programmatic announcement of Rosenzweig's basic quarrel with German Idealism over the standpoint out of which systematic knowledge may be attained: an Absolute standpoint that claims to overcome the limits of human finitude will not yield true knowledge of the All.
From the time of Bodhidharma to the present, each generation of the Zen lineage claimed to have attained the same spiritual awakening as its predecessors, thereby preserving the Buddha's "lamp of wisdom".
By most people's standards, The New York Hat would be precocious, but the vain Loos so often embroidered the truth that, in the telling of this story, she often claimed to have attained her movie debut as a teenager, even as young as 12 years old.
Upon recovery, she claimed to have attained a different level of consciousness – "a sense of being in touch with something else" – and the solitary hours confined to her bed produced the highly wrought novel Out (1964), inspired by the nouveaux romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet (whom Brooke-Rose later translated).
This is not a problem, suggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in circumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific understanding.
He claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 22, 1908, but that has been disputed, and he also claimed to have attained the summit of Mount McKinley in September, 1908.
But it does mean that no one is able to be perfectly objective, and so we should humbly accept that although objective truth is worth striving for, none of us could claim to have fully attained it.
The paradox was reinforced by Confucius's repeated refusal to claim that he had ever attained ren himself.
