You are right. I did not respond to what you perceive as flaws in the principle.

I did not because I did not think that any of this is relevant to the principle. That is why instead I decided to demonstrate how the principle works.

My principle prevents me from trying to defend an absurdity as if it were not absurd. You being stubborn, do not see the absurdity of your position. There is little I can do about that.

So, let me be clear.

My principle gives me no warrant to dismiss an interpretation. All my principle does is alert me to interpretations that ignore the conflicts evident in text which is what I see you doing.

When I pointed out these conflicts you tried various ways to evade the issue. One such error you repeat here. You say you see no evident error.

But the error is evident enough. Hegel ignores the role that context plays in the use of indexicals.

Why does he do this? Has Hegel made a mistake? Has he committed an obvious blunder?

You just deny the evident difficulty.

I see this as your fear of error.

So, unless it is a sophism to question any reading that ignores difficulties made evident in the text then my principle cannot be mistaken for a sophism.

Common consciousness uses indexicals all the time without being mistaken when doing so. There is no evident error.

And as I and others have demonstrated, Hegel’s account of how consciousness is in error is absurd on its face.

So, you wonder why must there be errors in an account of truth?

The reason has to do with how Hegel understands truth. For Hegel, truth is what first appears as error.

In particular, a dialectical truth first appears as a self-conflicted reason. The dialectic first has to exhibit this irrationality before the speculative alternative can recollect the irrationality as a rational because coherent absolute form.

The best example of this is how the true infinite is the bad infinite differently apprehended.

In the Phenomenology, truth by indirection has an account of the limitations of the reader exhibited in a self-alienated manner as the limitations of natural consciousness.

Since I read the exposition as the reader coming to know himself with the first mode of natural consciousness being the most austere and incomplete mode of our self-knowing I am able to see why when we step in for consciousness we cognize not as would a common consciousness but only as a severely limited reader is able to cognize.

With this, I offer an interpretation that does not ignore an obvious textual difficulty. I push through error on the way to truth.

In this way, a seeming error is recollected as a moment in the development of the first truth about our knowing when self-alienated.

No one has to accept my way of overcoming the evident difficulty with Hegel’s peculiar rendering of immediate cognition.

But if one does not even recognize the evident difficulty or refuses to try to deal with it, then others will be likely to dismiss Hegel scholars as blind to difficulties that clearly trouble non-Hegelians.

Hegel scholars tend to be dismissed in the broader philosophical community because they have done a poor job of speaking to anyone who is not of the tribe of Hegel scholars.

In the eyes of these other scholars, Hegel scholars are unable or unwilling to see difficulties that everyone else has no trouble seeing.

This is particular so when it comes to the difficulty of making sense of a refutation of a sense knowing that ignores context.

Saying that this is Hegel’s position is no defense.

• Alan