Back in 1981, Phyllis Lauder wrote in "The British, European and American Shorthair Cat" wrote of news from Australia of "interference not beneficial to the domestic shorthairs". A correspondent, Mrs Batten, had been asked for her views on the idea of crossing Manx with Scottish Folds. Scottish Folds had not yet been recognised. Lauder wrote that the idea was born of "love of change for its own sake and by the desire to meddle" since a Manx/Fold cross would not only produce a freakish-looking cat, it would be a tragedy for the cats - the two breeds had enough to contend with in refuting charges of deformity. The unrecognised Oriental Fold is a Siamese/Oriental type cat with folded ears (I believe it came from attempts to breed colourpoint Scottish Folds). The Hemingway Fold is an unrecognised variety of fold-eared cat with extra toes. The term "Hemingway" is often used in America to describe polydactyl cats (mitten cats). It results either from a spontaneous
. . . These qualifications do not foreseeably come to an end. If we try to build in the appropriate hedges ("If you walk into the room, and you have your eyes open, and your sensory apparatus is functioning, . . . "), more qualifications crop up: Are you walking forward rather than backing into the room? Has something been interposed between you and the chair? Has the chair been camouflaged? Has it been rendered invisible by Martians? Has your brain been altered by a freakish burst of Q-radiation from the sky? We can go on like this for days. The moral is that what we take to be "the" verification condition for a given empirical statement presupposes a massive background of default auxiliary assumptions. Those assumptions are usually perfectly reasonable, and it is no accident that we make them. But a particular "verification condi- tion" is associated with a given sentence only if we choose to rely on such assumptions, almost any of which may fail
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