Trees

I remember the day I was told this riddle, in third grade.
Q.: How far can you walk into a forest?
A.: Halfway.

A conceptual question posing as an empirical one.

Trees, forest. Forest, trees.
The forest is nothing over and beyond the trees. That's what "forest" means. But someone claiming to "see the forest" still implies more than "I see some trees." ("A forest is a bunch of trees" is not analytic.) And if you "can't see the forest for the trees" what you need is a change in aspect. (Superimposed concepts.)

I keep forgetting:

There are many ways of following a rule, obeying a norm, doing something. With feeling, or without. Meaningfully, or not. While legislating that everyone do the same, or unthinkingly.

So the demand that we make our own contributions to what we say does represent an ideal. (Although we must also be able to answer for the consequences of doing something unthinkingly. And sometimes we needn't have a higher standard than that.) But the existence of norms also means the possibility of revision in the light of what we take them to mean. It means the possibility of overturning them, of demanding that people act from a source other than complacency. (When we revise, this is what we do.)