From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!yorku.ca!rreiner Tue Nov 26 12:32:38 EST 1991
Article 1607 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!yorku.ca!rreiner
>From: rreiner@nexus.yorku.ca (Richard Reiner)
Subject: Re: Is dialectical thought an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <rreiner.691120373@yorku.ca>
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Organization: York University
References: <rreiner.690959273@yorku.ca> <s90wBB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1991 01:52:53 GMT

rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:

>What you have offered is a prescription for the Lockean
>"plainstyle" of writing, which although itself rhetorical -- it
>seems to promise "clarity" or "common sense" or such like virtues
>-- believes itself to be "serious" and free of rhetorical devices.

The grammar of your sentence indicates that the style itself has this
belief.  Since that is obviously false, perhaps there is someone you
have in mind.  But nobody here has claimed such a thing.

>If somebody
>writing in the plainstyle first uses a term, such as "algorithm"
>or "model," in a precise, mathematical sense and then gradually
>extends the meaning metaphorically and analogically in small,
>quantum-like steps that go unnoticed, by the end of his discourse
>you have a tissue of verbal structures masquerading as scientific
>exposition.
>
>Isn't it better to discuss imprecise notions in
>language which honestly foregrounds its own imprecision?

No.  If someone has used a term inconsistently, it is better to call
attention to the diverging senses in use, and to show how the shift of
sense invalidates the argument, if it does.  (By the way, this sort of
error detection is done quite frequently in the kind of technical work
you have expressed disdain for.  AI people and technical philosophers
are not the self-deluding sheep you make us out to be.)

More to the point, if a writer has made no effort to be clear in the
first place, and has instead allowed her fancy to roam free in the
deconstructionist style, what is there to criticize in her work?
Surely even someone of your views will agree that irrefutable claims
are worthless.  (If I claim that all the universe is a manifestation
of the Rabbit God, and that there is nothing that can possibly count
as evidence against this view, then I ought to be ignored; similarly,
if I state a claim so vaguely that it cannot be determined what will
count as evidence against it, I ought to be ignored.)

Now: are you claiming that some party to this discussion has been
using some term inconsistently and thereby producing invalid
arguments?  It seems to me that you yourself are the only obvious
candidate for this role.

>Quotation marks are devices (Derrida calls them "graphemic
>gestures") for calling attention to the problematic status of
>words ("terms," "tokens," whatever) which _appear_ on the surface
>to be clear and "transparent."

If you are standing in the road, and I call to you "A hurglebun is
coming!", and you are in some doubt as to whether a hurglebun is a
pleasant thing to be in the vicinity of, would you rather a bystander
"called attention to the problematic status" of my utterance, or told
you whether a hurglebun is in fact a ravenous beast or a vendor of
tasty desserts?



