5.06.2011

not meteorological facts

The aim of a lyric poem in which occur the words ‘sunshine’ and ‘clouds,’ is not to inform us of certain meteorological facts, but to express certain feelings of the poet and to excite similar feelings in us. A lyric poem has no assertional sense, no theoretical sense, it does not contain knowledge.

—Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (lectures delivered at the University of London, 1934)

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