The world would seem flat and colourless. Repetition would be the only reality and everything would translate into an algorithm: always the same steps leading to identical results, in an effectual sequence. Language would stop taking leaps, everything intended to make our lives beautiful (music, dance, literature, painting, poetry, sculpture to list a few) would cease to exist. Figures of speech, like simile or metaphor, that make understanding easier and add depth to thinking would only be perceivable literally, losing their meaning. Life could never be an "as if", in Hans Veihinger's* sense, and thus would seem always unknown and frightful. Abstract meanings and ideas would have no framework to manifest in and would exist no more. (…)
* Hans Veihinger, philosopher, is the author of "Die Philosophie des Als Ob". In his view, man is made to act; his mind was bestowed to him not in order to seek the truth, but to act. In this task of his, distortions and fallacies serve him better than certainties. Mind, Veihinger tells us, most of the time works on (semi-)conscious fallacies. In his work, Veihinger uses plenty of examples to show the immense methodological importance of fallacy in a number of disciplines (mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc).
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