Robet Bumiller responds to Brad DeLong

DeLong's "assertion that whether [Richard] Clarke was out-of-the-loop or was the loop itself is a matter of fact, and that a reporter has a duty to ascertain and to report to her readers such matters of fact, did not meet with a response."

Well Brad, it is true that the question of whether Clarke was out of the loop falls on the fact side of the fact value distinction. However, VP Cheney's claim that "Well, he wasn't in the loop frankly on a lot of this stuff," does not exactly maximize the Popperian desiderandum of falsifiability [don't worry Brad DeLong knows what the hell that means whether or not I do]. The problem, professor DeLong, is to identify the meaning, and Platonic Ideal of "a lot of this stuff" and to distinguish it from the mere referent and signification of the aformentioned collocation of vocabules.

There is also the profound problem (explained to me by Dan Smith) of counterfactual conditionals. How. indeed, may a simple working journalist attempt to interpret a sentence in which VP Cheney chooses to include the word "frankly". Who among us is capable of imagining the hypothetical conceivable (but not possible) world in which Mr VP Cheney speaks frankly ?

I do not understand how anyone who is unwilling to confront the implications for quantum mechanics of the EPR experiment could dare to criticise Ms Bumiller for her unwillingness to explore the landscape of purely hypothetical impossible words in print in the NYT.