105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty]
This is Ludwig’s way of discussing the logical context of arguments.
So that is what confabulation is about. I’ll work on it for a month or two. In the meantime I will concentrate on the point of departure – of a portrait Charles Darwin which has yet to wing its way from this Sceptred Isle in your direction.
“Ludwig” has always to me seemed incapable of discussing one topic at a time. Here he drags in approximately one level of metatopic, which for him is a miracle of simplification.