When Trenton Merricks, the UVA philosopher who does not believe in chairs, gave up the fish, he got another arrow in his quiver. “I’m not that shocked,” he told me after I breathlessly informed him of the dissolution of the category. This is exactly what he’s trying to get his students to understand. That we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. That we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”
