my daughter jane is an optimist. i tend toward the other extreme. she often frames the matter in terms of the classic chestnut of whether the glass is half empty or half full, which famously seems to be an insoluble dilemma. however, she has solved it. if you've just poured the juice into a glass up to half, then the glass is half full. if you've poured it full and just drained it off by half, then the glass is half empty. voila!

notes: according to wittgenstein, meaning is use, and this is precisely why and when we would actually describe a glass containing liquid at the halfway point as half full or half empty. second, this is an example of a wider idea: that the facts depend on an unfolding context, that truth is historical or that often isolating a truth from an unfolding temporal context is not possible or loses what is most important. what is true is a matter of an unfolding situation which itself emerges in a wider context.

and the moral lesson is that you should never fill your glass all the way up: fill it twice halfeway instead, and then the world is a lovely optimistic thing where stuff always turns out well!