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 All gorillas are Sigourney Weaver 13 Sep 2007 As a silverback, I am always intrigued when you humans start to debate our nature, or put us in silly films (not that the one with Sigourney was silly – any film she’s in is fine by me. We don’t get much film out here in the wild, anyway). But,… 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.