My mother had spent that summer trying to tell me about philosophy as well as language but I never did understand it. When I walked into my first lecture I saw, chalked on the board, ‘The aim of metaphysics is to arrive at profound truths about everything.’ This struck me as being a little too ambitious for me. After all, I wasn’t even sure why I was studying it. While other students were out drinking and partying I wrestled with Xeno’s four paradoxes and Wittgenstein’s pink triangles. I tried to get to grips with Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the only conclusion I could reach was that he, Kant, was obviously barking mad. However, the intellectual hurdle I could never clear was Quine’s truth-functional logic. I decided to agree with him when he threw out his two dogmas with the baby and the bath-water. I even applauded his escape from the entanglements of Plato’s beard — but what did he mean by logic?

I spent hours in the flat trying to ignore the flashing of neon across the ceilings, reading Quine’s arcane text. I read again and again about quantificational schemata and the extension of equivalence but nothing ever became clearer. Each chapter was followed by exercises that baffled me. ‘If Hawkshaw saw me, the jig is up’ reduced, apparendy, to ~ (Hawkshaw saw me. ~the jig is up). I eventually grasped that what I was being asked to do was replace words with symbols, but which symbols and why? (x is prior to Sept. 14 1940. Olaf sees Stromboli at x. ~“Stromboli erupts at x). Quine swept through this without remarking on why Olaf was there, watching a volcano erupt, and he certainly never remarked on how Olaf felt about this experience. ‘Put the following into symbols,’ Quine instructed: ‘When it rains in Pago Pago it pours.’

Eventually I asked Dr Price, a young lecturer who seemed the least terrifying of all of them, to explain predicates to me. ‘The introduction of a predicate or predicate-schemata P,’ he explained, ‘at a given occurrence of a predicate letter, consists in supplanting that occurrence and the attached string of variables by the expression which we get from P by putting the initial variable of the string for one, the next variable for two, and so on.’ He smiled broadly as I stared at him, appalled. ‘So …’

He stood up and began to write the proofs on the board behind him. Not knowing what else to do, I began to copy them.

And on and on and on for a further eighteen impenetrable lines. I stopped writing as he filled the board with symbols and instead I watched the buses trundling along the Strand.

‘So, do you have any questions?’ Dr Price asked when he’d finished.

‘Do you think carpentry is an honest profession?’

He frowned. ‘Carpentry is an honest profession. A statement. So …’ He turned back to the board, sketched the proposition ‘— carpentry is a dishonest profession’ (3x)~(I interrupted him. ‘I have to go. Thank you.’ Dr Price looked surprised.