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Does it distinguish a ''wantonly'' blank page from one whose lack of content came about from a feebler conviction? (Recklessness<ref>in that the author apprehended the risk the page would be bare and took it anyway.</ref>, for example, or negligence<ref>In that a reasonable person in the author’s position would have realised there was a risk the page would be blank</ref> in omitting to put anything on a page? Could the redundant page have been overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all? | Does it distinguish a ''wantonly'' blank page from one whose lack of content came about from a feebler conviction? (Recklessness<ref>in that the author apprehended the risk the page would be bare and took it anyway.</ref>, for example, or negligence<ref>In that a reasonable person in the author’s position would have realised there was a risk the page would be blank</ref> in omitting to put anything on a page? Could the redundant page have been overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all? | ||
Agonising over the writer’s [[mens rea]] obscures the real question: WHO CARES? What difference does it make why the page is blank? It | Agonising over the writer’s [[mens rea]] obscures the real question: WHO CARES? What difference does it make why the page is blank? It ''is'' blank: that is a brute existential fact<ref>Or would be, had you not written that very thing on the page to contradict yourself. See below.</ref>. | ||
A [[mediocre lawyer|diligent student]] pipes up from the back: “But, why, can’t you see? It is an omission. It is the ''failure to say something''. A fellow can infringe her neighbour’s rights by omission just as well as she can by action.” | A [[mediocre lawyer|diligent student]] pipes up from the back: “But, why, can’t you see? It is an omission. It is the ''failure to say something''. A fellow can infringe her neighbour’s rights by omission just as well as she can by action.” | ||
Revision as of 22:52, 31 December 2016
It is a founding premise of legal inquiry that one does not waste words: words one has gone to the trouble of inserting, one must mean something by.
Counter-examples are legion, of course, but of all the vacuities a legal eagle can commit to a page, none is quite so pointless as this:
“This page is intentionally left blank.”
Beyond dispensing with the concern that there might be writing on it that you just can’t see, what could this mean?
Does it distinguish a wantonly blank page from one whose lack of content came about from a feebler conviction? (Recklessness[1], for example, or negligence[2] in omitting to put anything on a page? Could the redundant page have been overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all?
Agonising over the writer’s mens rea obscures the real question: WHO CARES? What difference does it make why the page is blank? It is blank: that is a brute existential fact[3].
A diligent student pipes up from the back: “But, why, can’t you see? It is an omission. It is the failure to say something. A fellow can infringe her neighbour’s rights by omission just as well as she can by action.”
Au contraire.
The semantic content of an empty page is null. It is neither action not omission, but a formless void; inert; lacking the divine breath of a creator. It is neither alpha nor omega, nor anything between. An unmarked sheet is not a dog that fails to bark in the night time. It conveys no premise and permits no conclusion of any type or kind. An omission to say this or that cannot be imprisoned within the margins of an empty page: it is universal: it inhabits every page, however densely entexted, on which the thing is not said; it rides upon every breath on which the utterance does not pass.
To paraphrase a British Prime Minister, “a blank page means a blank page”.Be in no doubt, dear reader: This statement, like the page it decorates, is joyously, wilfully, defiantly —and with the publisher’s unequivocal endorsement — blank’'. For the avoidance of doubt.
Except — and it brings no pleasure to point the glaringly obvious out, but here goes — as soon as one dollops a great wodge of italicised, square-bracketed text right in the middle of a page, IT IS NOT BLANK.
This puts us in a fine old pickle. If the only way we can be certain a page is blank is by writing on it, can we ever be sure of anything ever again? Have we hit a kind of Russell’s paradox[4] of the law? We seem to have hit a patch of legal quantum indeterminacy. What would Descartes think? Or Gödel? Can’t you just imagine Schrödinger, sitting on his chair, stroking his cat?
Scribo “non”, ergo non scribo.
Plain English Anatomy™ Noun | Verb | Adjective | Adverb | Preposition | Conjunction | Latin | Germany | Flannel | Legal triplicate | Nominalisation | Murder your darlings
References
- ↑ in that the author apprehended the risk the page would be bare and took it anyway.
- ↑ In that a reasonable person in the author’s position would have realised there was a risk the page would be blank
- ↑ Or would be, had you not written that very thing on the page to contradict yourself. See below.
- ↑ Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R is itself not a member of itself, then it must contain itself. If it contains itself, then it cannot be a member of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves