In "The Model and the Marriage Broker," Cukor gave Thelma Ritter, the uncrowned queen of character actors, a starring role as the matchmaker who both probes the truth of her clients' sorrowful private lives and contrives the stories that help make the matches, all the while keeping her own story closely under wraps.
In both cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the humans or elephants have.
Both also confirm the truth of G. K. Chesterton's dictum that at the back of every artist's mind is "a secret planet" in which he or she chooses to wander.
Hence, there are obstacles both in assessing the truth of claims in the social sciences and in basing decisions upon them, insofar as we appear to have little experience of producing what we want by reference to them.
If the truth-value of modal predications is sensitive to ways of conceiving objects, as the modern day anti-essentialist would agree, and if Spinoza endorses a variety of modally relevant ways of conceiving objects, then he can consistently affirm both the truth and falsity of full-blown necessitarianism relative to different ways of conceiving finite objects.
The sentence 'Language exists' will have a contingent epistemic 1-intension, because there are possible scenarios that are apriori consistent with both the truth and falsity of that sentence.
Both the truth-values of the asserted premises and the strength of evidential support they confer on the conclusions will be difficult for the layperson to assess.
But the events at LAX last Friday showed both the truth and the lie of the "good guy with a gun" promise: Yes, because the gunman's target, a major airport, is one of the most security-heavy facilities in the country, he was brought down quickly by armed police.
