“All propositions are of equal value.”
Erasure“All propositions are of equal value.” appears as a self-contained expression, stated without attribution or explanation. Its declarative form makes no distinction among propositions: the sentence offers equality as a rule, while leaving the rule’s scope and implications unstated.
Form and Meaning
The maxim’s force comes from its breadth and compression. It does not identify which propositions are being compared or provide a reason for treating them equally. That absence keeps the statement open to competing readings: it may sound like a principle of impartiality, but it may also flatten distinctions that matter. The text supplies no explicit gloss that settles the tension.
Narrative Placement
The expression follows a dream in which the narrator recalls being alone on a moonlit pier, then sees his sister trying anxiously to tell him something. She asks, “Did you see him?”; the narrator asks whom she means, and then wakes. The maxim stands immediately after this unresolved encounter, without explaining the dream or identifying the figure in her question.
The next morning, after walking through the back room used as a woodshop, the narrator opens his mail. His agent’s letter introduces a rejection of the narrator’s latest novel. The maxim therefore falls between an intimate but unexplained dream and a concrete professional disappointment. The text does not state that the rejection illustrates or disproves the maxim; its placement instead leaves the proposition suspended beside scenes in which meaning and value remain unsettled.
