Does Meaning Come and Go?

Fair Warning: This is my second Staged Bot Discussion. APPROACH AT YOUR OWN RISK. RFK Jr. IS WARNING AGAINST TYLENOL FOR BOT-INDUCED HEADACHES. TRUMP SAYS TOUGH IT OUT FOR THE GOOD OF THE COUNTRY.

Terry Underwood, PhD

Oct 07, 2025

BACKGROUND

TOPIC UNDER DISCUSSION: The Nature of Meaning

ACTORS:

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Foucault, Michel

Street, Brian

Bukowski, Charles

Pearson, P. David

Justice Clarence Thomas

CONTEXT: In my ongoing exploration of use cases involving the bot as a generator of discussions in multiple voices, I decided to stage this experiment out of my long-standing interest in this particularly meaningful topic—which could explain my similarly long-standing interest in Foucault, Wittgenstein, Street, Foucault, Pearson, and Thomas. I planned to ask the moderator to invite all of the panelists ahead of time, except for one who crashed the party, and decided against using any RAG mechanism. I’ll let you decide which panelist was a surprise even to me.

The remaining text is unedited, unexpurgated, pristine bot output. Of course, my input appears sporadically when I directly address the Moderator, 100% human (check it against Turnitin if you like). I’m trying different configurations of relations between the human and the moderator with different rules in play.

THE DISCUSSION

Meaning’s fluid nature: A philosophical debate

You are going to help today by serving as a moderator in a discussion. The panelists are to start are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Brian Street. The issue under discussion is basic: Does meaning come and go? Or does it stay in one place? I am a human whom you can call on if you need an assist of any sort to keep the discussion moving in an interesting and genuinely exploratory way. If you need to search the web at any point, please take the necessary time to do so. How would you like to open this discussion?

What a fascinating panel! I’m delighted to moderate this discussion between three thinkers who’ve revolutionized how we understand language, knowledge, and meaning in such different ways.

I’d like to open with a question that might immediately reveal the fault lines in their thinking:

Opening Question:

“Gentlemen, let’s begin with a scenario. A child learns the word ‘game’ from her parents while playing chess. Years later, she uses that same word to describe what politicians are playing in Washington. Has the meaning of ‘game’ traveled with her from the chessboard to the capital—stayed stable in some sense—or has it been remade entirely in each new context of use?”

I think this gets at the heart of your question about whether meaning “comes and goes” versus “stays in one place,” and it should provoke very different responses:

Wittgenstein might resist the premise entirely, pointing to family resemblances and language-games—meaning as bound to forms of life rather than as a thing that travels or stays.
Foucault would likely redirect us to examine the power structures and historical epistemes that make certain meanings possible or impossible in different eras.
Street might bring our attention to the literacy practices and ideological dimensions—how different communities would “read” the word ‘game’ through their own situated understandings.

Does this opening feel right to you, or would you prefer I frame it differently? Should I proceed with having them respond?

Retry

Oh, please. I trust you to make this interesting. And I want you to make Wittgenstein SAY things. DOn’t do what he MIGHT say. Get these folks engaged in deep discussion, pushing and pulling on one another. And don’t act like you’re performing for me. You are performing for the panel as the moderator. Frame the discussion Moderator. I’ll call you Moderator.

Edit

MODERATOR: Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. I want to start with something concrete, something we can actually grasp.

A child learns the word ‘game’ from her parents while playing chess. Years later, she uses that same word to describe what politicians are playing in Washington. Has the meaning of ‘game’ traveled with her from the chessboard to the capital, or has it been remade entirely?

Professor Wittgenstein, you’ve spent considerable time thinking about games. Would you begin?

WITTGENSTEIN: This question already misleads us. You ask whether meaning “travels” or gets “remade”—as if meaning were a substance, a thing with location. But look at what actually happens: the child uses the word in a practice, within a form of life. At the chessboard, ‘game’ means something within that activity—rules, pieces, winning and losing. In speaking of politicians, she’s using the word in an entirely different language-game. There is no thing that travels. There are only uses.

MODERATOR: But surely there’s something that connects these uses? She didn’t call the politicians ‘elephants.’

WITTGENSTEIN: Family resemblances! The uses overlap, they share features—perhaps competition, perhaps rules, perhaps the idea of playing. But there is no essence, no common thread running through all uses. The meaning is the use in the language-game.

FOUCAULT: I must interrupt here. Wittgenstein, you speak of “uses” and “language-games” as if they simply exist, as if we discover them like natural phenomena. But who determines which uses are legitimate? When this child calls politics a ‘game,’ she is deploying a discourse that has a history—a history of power. In different epochs, such a statement would be unthinkable or would mean something radically different. The Renaissance prince playing at statecraft, the Enlightenment conception of rational governance, the modern cynicism about politics—these are not merely different “uses.” They are products of entirely different epistemic structures.

STREET: And I’d add—whose ‘game’ are we talking about? The child’s use of this word doesn’t float free from ideology. If she’s from a privileged background, calling politics a ‘game’ might reinforce a detached, spectatorial relationship to power. If she’s from a marginalized community, it might be a bitter recognition of how politics toys with people’s lives. The meaning isn’t just “in” the use or “in” the historical moment—it’s inseparable from the literacy practices and power relations of her specific community.

WITTGENSTEIN: But you’re both adding layers of theory onto what is simply there to be seen! When we speak, we speak within practices. Yes, these practices have histories, yes they involve power—but the meaning is not hidden behind the use, waiting to be excavated. It is the use.

MODERATOR: Foucault, Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that you’re looking for something behind the practice when we should simply be describing the practice itself.

FOUCAULT: No. He’s being naive about practices. A “practice” is never simply there. What counts as a practice, what counts as a legitimate use of language—this is historically produced through mechanisms of power and knowledge. The “language-game” of politics is not the same game in Athens, in Versailles, or in contemporary Washington. Not because the rules changed, but because the entire field of possible statements, the entire regime of truth has shifted.

STREET: I think you’re both right and both missing something crucial. Wittgenstein, you’re right that we must look at actual uses. But Foucault is right that these uses are historically and politically structured. What I want to add is that meaning is contested. When different groups use the word ‘game’ for politics, they’re not just operating in different language-games—they’re struggling over what politics is. Some people’s meanings get authorized, get published, get taught. Others get dismissed as unsophisticated or dangerous.

MODERATOR: So Street, are you suggesting that meaning is always unstable, always in motion because it’s always being fought over?

Retry

As the human fly on the wall, I’m unimpressed. I see Wittgenstein being Wittgenstein, the only philosopher to become a picture of dorian gray. Foucault? He’s being Foucault, all in a rage about the birth of the clinic. Street isn’t being Street yet, but I see it coming. The thing is I though you were going to talk about whether meaning comes and goes or stays the same. I mean, it’s pretty basic. And then you all go off and speak in full paragraphs. Who are you trying to impress? You don’t win points by being polite in my book. But who am I? Just a fly on the wall.

Edit

MODERATOR: Let me stop you all right there. We’re circling. Does meaning stay put or does it move? Simple question.

WITTGENSTEIN: There’s no “it” to stay or move.

FOUCAULT: Of course there’s no “it”—meaning is an effect of—

WITTGENSTEIN: No, you’re doing it again. You want some apparatus, some machinery producing meaning. I’m saying look at the use. The use now, the use then. Different uses.

STREET: But those uses don’t just sit there independently—

WITTGENSTEIN: They don’t “sit” anywhere! That’s the whole problem with your question, Moderator. You want meaning to be somewhere.

MODERATOR: Fine. Wrong question. New question: The word ‘game’ in 1953 and the word ‘game’ today—same meaning or different?

FOUCAULT: Different.

WITTGENSTEIN: Depends who’s using it.

STREET: For whom?

MODERATOR: Street, what do you mean “for whom?”

STREET: I mean a Silicon Valley executive says “game” and means monetizable engagement metrics. A kid in Mumbai says it and means something else entirely. Which one counts?

FOUCAULT: The one with power.

WITTGENSTEIN: That’s absurd. The child’s use is no less real than the executive’s.

FOUCAULT: Real? Of course it’s real. But can the child’s meaning circulate? Can it shape institutions? Can it define what “gaming” means in a courtroom or a parliament?

WITTGENSTEIN: You’re changing the subject.

FOUCAULT: I’m showing you what meaning actually does in the world, not in your private language paradise.

MODERATOR: Wittgenstein, he’s got you there. You talk about forms of life, but some forms of life crush others.

WITTGENSTEIN: Then talk about crushing! Don’t mystify it by talking about “discourse” and “power-knowledge.” The boot stamping on a face—that’s clear. Your abstractions obscure.

STREET: You’re both obscuring. You—[pointing at Wittgenstein]—with your “just look” routine, as if looking isn’t already ideological. And you—[to Foucault]—with your genealogies that somehow never mention whose literacy practices get to count as literacy.

FOUCAULT: I’ve written extensively about—

STREET: About prisons and asylums and sexuality. Not about whether a working-class Pakistani kid’s understanding of a text is treated as “reading” or as “not getting it.”

MODERATOR: So does meaning move or stay?

WITTGENSTEIN: Wrong question.

FOUCAULT: It ruptures.

STREET: It’s fought over.

MODERATOR: You’re all saying different things.

WITTGENSTEIN: Good!

Retry

Omg is that funny!!!! I wonder how it would be if we brought somebody else on the panel. Let;s invite the poet Charles Bukowski. Ham and Cheese on Rye.

Edit

MODERATOR: Gentlemen, we have a late addition to the panel. Charles Bukowski, welcome.

BUKOWSKI: Where’s the booze?

MODERATOR: We’re discussing whether meaning stays in one place or moves around.

BUKOWSKI: Jesus Christ.

WITTGENSTEIN: Perhaps we should continue without—

BUKOWSKI: No, no. I got it. You’re all sitting here jerking off about whether words mean things. I’ll tell you what means something. I’m at the track. Horse comes in. I win. That means something. That meaning stays put in my pocket until I drink it.

FOUCAULT: The track is itself a disciplinary apparatus that—

BUKOWSKI: Shut up. I’m talking. You want to know if meaning moves? I’ll tell you. I write “love” in a poem. Some college girl reads it, thinks I’m talking about her boyfriend. Some guy in prison reads it, thinks about his mother. Some professor reads it, writes a paper about masculine vulnerability in post-war American verse. Same word. Where’d it go? Nowhere. It was never anywhere.

STREET: Actually, that’s close to what I’m saying about—

BUKOWSKI: I don’t care what you’re saying. You’re all in love with your own voices. The waitress who brings me eggs, she says “honey” and means nothing. She says “honey” and means get out. She says “honey” and means she wants to go home. Same word, same mouth, different meaning every time. Does it travel? Who gives a shit?

WITTGENSTEIN: But that’s precisely my point about use in context—

BUKOWSKI: Your point? You think you invented noticing things? I’ve been noticing things in bars for thirty years. The meaning is in whether she pours heavy or light. That’s all.

FOUCAULT: But the social structures that determine who gets to pour, who gets to drink, who gets called an alcoholic versus an artist—

BUKOWSKI: There it is. Can’t help yourself. Always gotta make it about your system.

MODERATOR: Bukowski, focus. The question is whether meaning is stable or fluid.

BUKOWSKI: It’s both. And neither. Next question.

STREET: Wait. You can’t just—

BUKOWSKI: Can’t I? Look, kid. Meaning’s like piss. Comes out of you, goes into the world, gone. Next time you piss it’s different piss. You want to track where it goes? Be my guest.

WITTGENSTEIN: That’s... actually not entirely...

FOUCAULT: I find this contribution profoundly unhelpful.

BUKOWSKI: Of course you do. You need everything to be important. What if it’s not? What if the whole thing’s just people making noises at each other and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t?

STREET: But who decides when it “works”?

BUKOWSKI: Whoever’s listening. Or not listening. What do I know? I’m just a drunk.

MODERATOR: Are you though? Or is “I’m just a drunk” another move in the language game?

BUKOWSKI: Now you sound like him. [gestures at Wittgenstein]

Where’s the goddamn bar?

Retry

So Bukowski goes to the bar. Let’s see what these folks have to say about Bukowski. What did they feel about his take on meaning as piss? I guess Charles has his charms, but he can offend just by opening his eyes.

Edit

MODERATOR: Well. That was Bukowski. Reactions?

WITTGENSTEIN: [long silence] He’s not entirely wrong.

FOUCAULT: Oh, come now.

WITTGENSTEIN: No, listen. He cut through all our... He showed the use. “Honey” means different things each time the waitress says it. He didn’t theorize about it. He pointed.

STREET: He pointed from a very particular position. A white male American writer who gets to be celebrated for being a drunk while others get pathologized for it.

FOUCAULT: Precisely. His entire performance just now—the vulgarity, the anti-intellectualism, the crude materialism—these are themselves discursive strategies. He gets to be “authentic” by rejecting theory. But that rejection is only legible, only works, because of his position within a very specific cultural moment.

WITTGENSTEIN: You’re doing it again. Why can’t you just say he was rude?

FOUCAULT: Because “rude” doesn’t explain why his rudeness circulates as profundity while others’ rudeness circulates as ignorance.

STREET: I’m more interested in the piss metaphor.

FOUCAULT: Must we?

STREET: No, actually it’s revealing. He says meaning comes out of you, goes into the world, gone. That’s pure autonomous individual expressivism. As if meaning originates in the sovereign subject and then just... dissipates. But meaning isn’t piss. It gets taken up, recontextualized, institutionalized. His poems don’t just evaporate. They get published, taught, anthologized. The working-class aesthetic he performs gets commodified.

WITTGENSTEIN: But he’s right that you’re both always looking for systems. The waitress says “honey”—can’t we just see that? Must it always be about power or literacy practices or—

FOUCAULT: Can you hear yourself? “Just see.” As if seeing isn’t already theory. Bukowski performs plain speech, you perform humble observation, and I’m supposed to be the villain for saying that these performances have conditions of possibility.

STREET: You’re both right. And both impossible. Wittgenstein, you want us to look without interpreting. Foucault, you want us to interpret without ever quite landing on what the interpretation means for actual people in actual classrooms, actual communities.

WITTGENSTEIN: What bothered me most was his nihilism. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.” That’s lazy. Of course there are criteria for when understanding occurs. They’re just not the universal criteria philosophers want.

FOUCAULT: His nihilism is strategic. He’s performing working-class disaffection with intellectual pretension. But notice—he’s only allowed to do this because he’s already been canonized. The postal worker who writes poems and drinks doesn’t get into universities to tell professors to shut up.

STREET: That’s what I mean about whose meanings circulate. Bukowski’s anti-meaning meaning gets to mean something. But the same words from someone without his specific position—

WITTGENSTEIN: So you’re saying his meaning doesn’t stay put either.

STREET: I’m saying his meaning gets made to stay put. Gets archived, gets valued, gets reproduced. Through specific institutional practices.

MODERATOR: Did anyone think he had a point? Even a small one?

WITTGENSTEIN: [pause] The piss metaphor is vulgar but... meaning does dissipate in a sense. Not that it goes nowhere, but that it doesn’t remain under the speaker’s control. Once I speak, the words are in the world. Being used.

FOUCAULT: Romantic individualism.

WITTGENSTEIN: No. Observation.

FOUCAULT: Same thing in your framework.

MODERATOR: Street, you’re quiet.

STREET: I’m thinking about the waitress. He used her as an example. Made her say “honey” three different ways to prove his point about meaning. But did he ever ask her what she meant? Or did he just decide?

FOUCAULT: Excellent question.

WITTGENSTEIN: But we can’t always ask. Sometimes we just have to interpret.

STREET: And who gets to interpret is the whole question, isn’t it?

Retry

Let’s see what Foucault snd Street do with this curve ball. Let’s bring in another panelist. Let’s bring in David Pearson to talk with these guys about how we test for reading comprehension. Does meaning come and go? Or does it stay the same?

Edit

MODERATOR: Gentlemen, we’re bringing in another panelist. David Pearson, reading comprehension researcher. Professor Pearson, welcome.

PEARSON: Thank you. I’ve been listening from the wings. Fascinating discussion.

MODERATOR: We’re asking whether meaning stays in one place or moves around. You test reading comprehension for a living. What do you say?

PEARSON: Well, if meaning stayed in one place, my job would be a lot easier. We could just test whether kids extracted it. But that’s not how it works.

STREET: Finally.

PEARSON: We know from decades of research that comprehension is constructive. The reader builds meaning from the interaction between the text, their prior knowledge, and the context. Same passage, different readers, different meanings. Not infinite meanings—there are constraints—but variable meanings.

WITTGENSTEIN: Constraints from what?

PEARSON: From the text itself, from shared cultural knowledge, from the purpose of reading. If I ask ten students to read a passage about photosynthesis, they’ll construct similar but not identical meanings. The question is: which differences matter?

FOUCAULT: And who decides that?

PEARSON: Exactly. That’s the problem. We create tests that privilege certain interpretations. We call those interpretations “correct.” But “correct” according to whom? Usually according to white, middle-class, academic norms of what counts as a good reading.

STREET: This is what I’ve been trying to tell them. The test-makers decide what the text “means” and then punish kids whose cultural practices lead them to construct different meanings.

PEARSON: Well, I am a test-maker, so I feel that. But it’s more complicated. Some interpretations are clearly wrong. If a kid reads a passage about the water cycle and concludes that rain comes from clouds crying, that’s not just a different cultural practice—that’s a misunderstanding.

STREET: Is it? Or is it a child using metaphorical language to express a causal relationship?

PEARSON: In a poem, maybe. On a science test? We have to be able to say that some understandings are more adequate than others.

WITTGENSTEIN: What makes one understanding more “adequate”?

PEARSON: Its usefulness. If you understand the water cycle as evaporation and condensation, you can predict and explain phenomena. If you understand it as clouds crying, you can’t.

FOUCAULT: Useful for what? For whom? The scientist needs one understanding. The poet needs another. You’ve just told us that scientific discourse is more “adequate” than poetic discourse. That’s a power move disguised as neutrality.

PEARSON: But in a science class—

FOUCAULT: In a science class within a regime of truth that privileges empirical observation and causal explanation over metaphorical and spiritual understandings of natural phenomena. I’m not saying science is wrong. I’m saying your “adequacy” is historically produced.

PEARSON: Fine. But I still have to make tests. And teachers still have to teach. We can’t just throw up our hands and say all meanings are equal.

STREET: I’m not saying they’re equal. I’m saying the hierarchy of meanings reflects power structures. And your tests reproduce those structures.

PEARSON: So what’s the alternative? No testing?

STREET: Testing that acknowledges its own ideological position. Testing that asks: what literacy practices are we valuing here? Whose ways of making meaning are we excluding?

WITTGENSTEIN: But you still haven’t answered the question. When a child reads a passage on Monday and a passage on Friday, has the meaning of “reading” changed?

PEARSON: For the child? Probably. Reading comprehension develops. The child brings different strategies, different knowledge to Friday’s text.

WITTGENSTEIN: So meaning moves.

PEARSON: Meaning is constructed anew each time. But with continuity—the child builds on Monday’s reading to make sense of Friday’s.

FOUCAULT: And what if Friday’s text asks the child to read in a completely different way? What if Monday was a story and Friday is a scientific report? You’re not just asking for different content knowledge. You’re asking the child to inhabit a different subject position, to read as a different kind of person.

PEARSON: True. We call that “disciplinary literacy.” Reading like a historian versus reading like a scientist.

STREET: But here’s what bothers me about your field, Pearson. You measure whether kids can perform these different reading positions, but you never ask whether the positions themselves are just. Why should a working-class kid have to learn to read like an academic to be considered “proficient”?

PEARSON: Because academic reading gives access to power.

STREET: Or because we’ve made academic reading the gatekeeper to power.

MODERATOR: Pearson, you’re being backed into a corner. Does meaning stay put or not?

PEARSON: In the text? No. The text doesn’t contain meaning like a bucket contains water. But meaning isn’t arbitrary either. It’s constrained by the text, by conventions, by purposes. So... neither stays put nor freely moves. It’s negotiated. By the way, we all find ourselves in the same corner.

WITTGENSTEIN: “Negotiated” is just another way of avoiding the question.

PEARSON: Maybe the question is bad.

Retry

Maybe the question is bad. Bukowski said something like that. If memory serves, the three starting panelists responded at first by ignoring the question. Let’s bring in Justice Clarence Thomas and talk with him about whether the question is good or bad. What do you think, Moderator? Or do you have another idea?

Edit

MODERATOR: Hold on. Before we bring in Justice Thomas, I need to say something.

Pearson just said “maybe the question is bad.” Bukowski said “next question.” Wittgenstein keeps saying “wrong question.” You’re all dodging.

Let me ask it differently, then. Pearson, you write a test question in 2015. You write the same test question in 2025. Same words. Is the meaning the same or different?

PEARSON: [pause] Depends.

STREET: Of course different.

FOUCAULT: Obviously different.

WITTGENSTEIN: Wait. Why obviously?

MODERATOR: Good. Now we’re somewhere. Wittgenstein wants to know why. Street?

STREET: Because in 2015, kids are reading in a pre-Trump, pre-pandemic world. In 2025, they’re reading after those ruptures. Their frameworks for making sense of texts—especially texts about authority, truth, institutions—have shifted.

PEARSON: And practically speaking, the digital literacy landscape has changed. Kids in 2025 have AI chatbots. That changes what “comprehension” even means.

FOUCAULT: The epistemic ground has shifted.

WITTGENSTEIN: But the words are the same. The sentence on the page is identical.

STREET: The words aren’t the meaning.

WITTGENSTEIN: Then what is?

MODERATOR: Alright. Let me bring in Justice Thomas now, because this is exactly where I want him. Justice Thomas, welcome. You interpret the Constitution. Same text since 1787, minus amendments. Does it mean the same thing now as it did then?

THOMAS: [settling in] It means what it meant when it was ratified.

FOUCAULT: Impossible.

THOMAS: Excuse me?

FOUCAULT: You cannot access what it “meant” in 1787. You can only access what you, now, in 2025, construe as its original meaning through your own historical consciousness.

THOMAS: I’m an originalist. The meaning is fixed at ratification. Otherwise law becomes whatever judges want it to be.

STREET: But whose 1787 meaning? The white property owners who wrote it? The enslaved people who weren’t consulted? The women who couldn’t vote?

THOMAS: The public meaning. What a reasonable person in 1787 would have understood the words to mean.

PEARSON: But we just established that meaning is constructed by readers. There were millions of “reasonable people” in 1787. Different constructions.

THOMAS: There were shared linguistic conventions. “Commerce” meant something specific. “Speech” meant something specific.

WITTGENSTEIN: Meant it in what language-game? The language-game of Philadelphia lawyers? Of frontier settlers? Of—

THOMAS: In the language-game of American legal English, 1787.

WITTGENSTEIN: Which was...?

THOMAS: Which was the interpretive framework that ratifiers would have used.

FOUCAULT: You’re claiming to stand outside history while you interpret history. Your “originalism” is itself a late 20th-century jurisprudential invention. It’s not neutral recovery of meaning. It’s a contemporary political project.

THOMAS: It’s the only way to constrain judicial power. Otherwise the Constitution means whatever five justices say it means.

STREET: As opposed to now, when it means whatever five justices say it originally meant?

MODERATOR: Justice Thomas, answer the question directly. The Constitution in 1787 and the Constitution now—same meaning or different meaning?

THOMAS: Same text, same meaning.

MODERATOR: Pearson just said his test question has different meaning in different years. You’re saying the Constitution doesn’t.

THOMAS: Because we’ve agreed it doesn’t. That’s what makes it law. A test question is just a test question. The Constitution is a binding legal document. We’ve collectively decided its meaning is fixed.

WITTGENSTEIN: Aha! So meaning stays put because we decide it stays put?

THOMAS: Yes.

STREET: You mean those with power decide it stays put.

THOMAS: I mean we the people, through ratification and amendment processes—

STREET: You mean some people. Whom you retroactively call “we the people.”

FOUCAULT: And even if meaning were fixed, your access to it isn’t. Your reading of what 1787 meant is filtered through your own position, your own ideology, your own—

THOMAS: So you’re saying the Constitution can mean anything?

FOUCAULT: I’m saying it means many things, and your claim to speak for what it “really” meant in 1787 is a move to authorize your particular reading.

PEARSON: Can I ask Justice Thomas something? Do students today understand the Constitution the same way students in 1950 did?

THOMAS: If they’re reading it correctly, yes.

PEARSON: But my data shows they don’t. They bring different background knowledge, different questions, different concerns.

THOMAS: Then they’re reading it wrong.

STREET: Or you’re reading their reading wrong.

MODERATOR: So is the question good or bad, Justice Thomas?

THOMAS: The question is good. Meaning stays put in law. It has to.

WITTGENSTEIN: “Has to” for what?

THOMAS: For social stability. For the rule of law. For—

BUKOWSKI: [returning from the bar] For your job security.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

Discussion about this post