1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), paragraph 471, p. 62e.
2. Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal: a Defence of Human Consciousness (Macmillan: London, 1991).
3. Raymond Tallis, ‘Facts, Statements and the Correspondence Theory of Truth’, chapter 7 of Nor Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1st edn, 1988; 2nd edn, 1995).
4. For an exhaustive discussion of the role of the conscious human agent in human affairs and a reaffirmation of this role against postmodern critiques, see Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: a Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London: Macmillan, 1997).
5. Nevertheless, the place of explicitness in the wider universe does need to be considered if the appeal to ‘explicitness’ as a defining – or irreducibly distinctive – feature of humanity is to be truly satisfying and not merely a veto upon a certain line of thought.