Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

6. Piglets of Infinite Regress

The author’s encounter with a shop window display leads to thoughts on the nature of truth.

I was quite young, I think, when I first noticed an anomaly in my toy collection. A truck had roughly the same dimensions as its associated cars. But, from experience, I knew that trucks are generally many times larger than cars. Something was wrong. I felt the need to get rid of the toy truck and before long I’d learnt that the problem was one of scale.

After a bit of searching, I happened upon a toy car-transporter truck, which seemed to be roughly in proportion to my assortment of toy cars. I’d also gleaned from my father or brother that scale could be expressed in numerical form – either as a fraction or as a ratio. I scrutinised the boxes of various toys, and sure enough, some displayed a scale. The most concise, in this regard, being the components of model railways. My attention moved to model railways therefore, out of respect for their shared scaling concerns. For a while I spent my pocket money on building up the stock of model railway items that were consistent with the best items in the existing collection.

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