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
Humor But I don’t know any graph theory! 7 Jun 2010 If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Bela Bollobas’s Modern Graph Theory. I am an in-depth account of graph theory, written with the student in mind; I reflect the current state of the subject and emphasize connections with other branches of pure mathematics. Recognizing that… Read More
Evolution A prehumous Darwin Award for Michelle Bachmann 2 May 2009 One of the things I don’t like about the Darwin Awards is that it presumes the only way to gain one is to remove yourself from the gene pool directly by dying. But that would be a Wallace Award. Darwin knew, as do we, that there are many ways one… Read More
Humor A quote that should be true 13 Aug 2010 … even if it probably isn’t At a television news station, one of the employees put up a sign in the elevator: “The ‘7’ button is broken. Please press ‘4’ and ‘3’.” Then he stood back and watched the behavior of those people who are supposed to tell us what… 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.