The Parable of the Fishermen

Once upon a time, there used to live a group of fishermen by the river Veritas. They used nets which had come down to them from the days of their grandparents, and their grandparents in turn had learnt the skills of making fishing nets from their own grandparents. These fishermen had in their town their own netmakers who made nets in just the same way that they had been taught by their forefathers. These nets were sewn out of thick and strong ropes, and were made in such a manner that each hole in them was 2 inch by 2 inch. With these, they caught various kinds of fish, some of which they ate and others they sold in the market every evening. There also lived in their community a very curious breed of people who had devoted their entire lives to cataloguing, tabulating, and systematising the various types of fish that had been caught from that river. The tables that they had built up were, they claimed, exhaustive, and these were taught to children in the schools, who grew up learning about the different kinds of fish that could be found in the river Veritas. Soon this formula became a part of household wisdom : a fish is any creature that lives in the river, and whose maximum length and maximum width are both 2 inches.

One morning, these fishermen had a strange visitor who claimed that he had come to their town from a village across the hills called Transcendence. He had on his back a huge bag, the contents of which he displayed to the stupified villagers. There fell out all kinds of things which looked very much like the fish that they had been catching with their own nets, except that these smooth slippery shiny things were all wider and longer than 2 inch by 2 inch. The village council sat for an emergency meeting to discuss a number of issues. First, should these new things be given the name 'fish' or were they just some variant or mutant of the species 'fish'? Second, why had they never been able to catch these bigger 'things' with their own nets?

The visitor from Transcendence had been asked to come along to the meeting. When it was over, he rose slowly and spoke, 'Sirs, may I suggest something? What if you asked your netmakers to make some new nets whose holes are 4 inch by 4 inch, and tried fishing in the river Veritas with these nets? Perhaps, then, you might see that these strange 'things' are fish after all, and that they exist in your very own river.'