C OUNT ALFRED KORSZYBSKI used to claim that to say of anything that it is anything-for example, to say of my car that it is an automobile-is to falsify, since (to stick to the example of my car) there are many automobiles and my car is not identical with all of them, nor is it identical with the Platonic Idea of an automobile. As part of the pseudoscience that he created, the pseudoscience of "General Semantics," he recommended that one should use the word etcetera as often as possible. In his view, it would be highly therapeutic to say, "That is an automobile, etc.," and not, "That is an automobile," in order to keep it in mind that the "that" referred to (my car) has infinitely many properties besides those mentioned in my statement. That everything we say is false because everything we say falls short of being everything that could be said is an adolescent sort of error; it is the burden of this essay to suggest that this adolescent error haunts the entire subject of interpretation. It must be conceded that the error has deep roots. Talk of "otherness," "exotopy," and "incommensurability" would not be as widespread as it is if the ideas of perfect knowledge, of falling short of perfect knowledge, and of the falsity of everything short of perfect knowledge did not speak to us. What those roots are is a matter for speculation. Certainly there is the desire for what psychoanalysts call "fusional" relationships. It is commonplace to say that the tragedy of life is that we are "alone," that such relationships are impossible; but perhaps as one grows older one comes to feel that separateness is a blessing as well as a curse. I really don't know what I'd do with a "fusional" relationship. Secondly, there is the epistemological worry which Stanley Cavell has brilliantly described in a recent book,1 the worry that one may simply not be getting the other right, that one may be deceived by a facade or be misreading all the clues. As Cavell points out, the classic epistemological problem, whether one can know what goes on inside another mind, can be a very real existential problem. And even if one makes the leap of trust and manages to understand another person more than superficially, and the further leap which allows one to trust one's perception that one is understanding the other more than superficially, one knows that what one understands is only a part of something infinitely complex. Human