Graphical Philosophy 4 Jul 20114 Jul 2011 Wittgenstein wrote: Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [On Certainty §611] Or, in a GIF: From Patton’s Argument Clinic. I think there’s a need for the entire corpus of modern philosophy to be done using GIF animations, don’t you? On which topic, see this post by Siris, on the Brain-Heart-Trolley-War-Kidney-[Evil Demon] Problem… Humor Logic and philosophy
Administrative Mutant genres 21 Oct 2007 This is a meme started by PZ Mackers. I will exact retribution upon him later. In the meantime, I have been tagged Read More
Humor God causes a Sumerian recession 17 Dec 2009 The Onion, as always, nails it… Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth. According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to… Read More
Outside of mathematics and a few other highly formalized subjects, it’s pretty hard to be sure that Mr. A says P and Mr. B says not P. Certainly a great many of the debates that occur on the Internet are dueling monologues, not that establishing that a real disagreement is under way keeps us from calling each other idiots and heretics since, or so it seems to me, the most heated conflicts are not about the truth or falsity of propositions but about whose preoccupations matter.
I call this, not originally, the phenomenon of talking past each other. It is a crucial aspect of what used to be called, before it was redefined by Hegelians and Marxists, dialectics. These days it is best called something like contrastivism or erotetics. Note that Ludwig asserted these principles “cannot be reconciled” – that presumes they compete in the same semantic space.