Shape

160 II Seeing How It Works
was three squares. He said this was its semantics—everyone agreed—and he went on to
say what this implied. When you erased one square you got two
The squares were obvious, and the arithmetic was the standard stuff everyone learned
in school. The tests I proposed to show how the shape worked without a given semantics
went too far. You could do them, only they were meaningless. They weren’t anything
anyone of good will and sound mind would try. It was a question of morality
and rationality. This was the simple truth: the shape had its semantics, and you
handled the former—the shape—in terms of the latter—its underlying structure. The
two were tied. But erasing didn’t work no matter how I went about it
Experiment—use pencil and paper—try it yourself and see what you get. And the
identity
x fi x
applied to more than squares when x was a rectangle
and to other parts, as well, when x was other things—maybe a long square bracket
or shorter ones of the same kind
At least the identity seemed to work in this way when I used tracing paper the way
designers do to find what’s there. See for yourself—the shape isn’t a set of parts
whatever they are. And drawing shows why. There’s no semantics—descriptions don’t
count—and there’s no syntax—words (units) fail. The usual distinctions blur and dis-