Isaac Asimov's Super Quiz
As of the new year, Isaac Asimov's Super Quiz was dropped from the Albany newspaper, reducing the number of dead authors on the comics page by one. There have been daily letters to the editor ever since. Today's begins:I read, with amused interest, the outcry over the pulling of the Super Quiz from the daily paper. I, too, was sad to see it go, but didn't feel the need to file a formal "complaint"...
Isn't there a term for the rhetorical strategy in which you begin by disclaiming the very argument you are about to make? (And, changing the subject, is it possible to link back to a specific post from the past, not merely saltinwound.com?)
posted by frank b. at
5:24 AM
9 Comments:
Frank, yes you can link to just one post. One way is to go to the right hand side and look in "Previous Posts" or the archives to find that post. click on it, then copy the link, and paste that into your new link, and voila!
frank-- hold on! I will see if i can make it better for linking
So the argument structure is
I didn't feel the need to file a formal complaint.
I was sad to see it go.
Conclustion: I filed a formal complaint.
Well, I would at least call this some sort of fallacy, which is a defect in an argument that consists in something other than merely false premises. His premises are not false, we can see, but his argument is clearly severely flawed.
Frank, notice now there is a gray search bar up top that will search salt in wound only. type in key words to find the post you want. then it will take you to the post for the link-- this is the easiest way, because the archives do not send you to a link, as you probably know.
You can also use Google to search for particular phrases in posts. Use quotes around the phrase. Google gives better results than the search bar at the top of the page, for some reason. It also indexes the blogs fairly regularly, seemingly within a couple of hours.
Of course, people who delight in pointing out errors in formal logic can be far more annoying than the errors themselves. Hopefully Salt in Wound postings do not cross this line.
Such a colleague recently ranted about another colleague who said:
"When my kids grow up, I plan on becoming a vegetarian and having more dinner options".
She took this as a claim that the set of vegetarian menu items was greater than the set of all menu items (with contempt for both the original speaker and vegetarianism barely masked), and how could someone with an advanced degree possibly think that? When, of course, all that was being expressed was a tiredness of hamburgers, pizza, and tater tots.
> Of course, people who delight in pointing out errors in formal
> logic can be far more annoying than the errors themselves.
I've been intentionally misusing the word recursion in an attempt to bait Bernie into pointing out the error. But she's not biting. Except for the first time I did it, when it wasn't intentional.
(A side note - people who point out grammatical errors can be way more annoying than the people who make the errors. To the best of my recollection that hasn't happened here. Or if it did, it happened recursively.)
I have to say that I have been seeing said word, Robert, and consistently bumping against it. It's very interesting, in that Psych 101 experiment kind of way, that my mind has refused to see it as being misused. Instead, I had convinced myself that I was not aware of the many definitions of the word.
The mind wants to give the writer the benefit of the doubt to such an extent (at times, at times) that it will adjust it's own understanding of a word to fit what seem to be the writer's intentions. That, or I'm just being overly contumacious. Or am I?
That is interesting. Looking back on how I'd used it, there's something about the sentence I hate it recursively that makes me instinctively want to believe it too. Like it sounds reasonable, for some reason.
I'm going to try using the sentence I hate it recursively with programmer friends here and see if anyone picks up on it. Just curious - is recursive a word that's in general use, or is it usually only used in technical contexts, or by engineers? All the online definitions I've found give it only a technical meaning.
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