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VAT is an indirect tax, in that the tax is collected from someone other than the person who actually bears the cost of the tax.
VAT was invented by Maurice Lauré, joint director of the French tax authority, the Direction générale des impôts, as taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA in French) in the 1950s.
VAT differs from a conventional sales tax in that VAT is levied on every business as a fraction of the price of each taxable sale they make, but they are in turn reimbursed VAT on their purchases, so the VAT is applied to the value added to the goods at each stage of production.
It is drawn from the idea, common to many science fiction stories, that a mad scientist might remove a person's brain from their body to suspension in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.
This refutation of the vat theory is a consequence of his endorsement of, at that time, the causal theory of reference.
Putnam contends that by "brain" and "vat" the brain in a vat must be referring not to things in "our" world but to elements of its own "virtual world"; and it is clearly not a brain in a vat in that sense.
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