Blinking on the tipping point of Ilkkanomics
I
believe I wrote earlier that the older I get, the more wisdom I beging
to see in the concept of "seen and not seen", and how applicable it is
in surprising contests. Another similar concept whose ubiquity and
explanatory power I have only recently learned to truly value is
"plausible deniability".
The third concept that I have in mind doesn't manifest itself quite as often as the previous two, and is in fact so unknown that I don't think that it even has a name. At least I had never even seen it mentioned anywhere until I read about it in Jamie Whyte's great little book "Crimes Against Logic": trying to refute somebody's argument by explaining why its conclusion is necessarily true. For example, when some apartment building has a violent problem tenant who threatens other tenants and won't clean up after his dog, someone would defend this man by saying that he can't really control his ramblings because of a stroke he suffered earlier, which also made him physically so immobile that he can't scoop the poop. Or, when somebody reacts to the post "The economics of marrying a foreign woman" at Marginal Revolution by mocking the Western men who go abroad to look for a wife as losers whom no Western woman would ever stoop down to.
Even though it's not that difficult to say "trying to refute somebody's argument by explaining why its conclusion is necessarily true", it would certainly be handy to have one word that would mean this. Would the English mavens reading this have any suggestions?
The third concept that I have in mind doesn't manifest itself quite as often as the previous two, and is in fact so unknown that I don't think that it even has a name. At least I had never even seen it mentioned anywhere until I read about it in Jamie Whyte's great little book "Crimes Against Logic": trying to refute somebody's argument by explaining why its conclusion is necessarily true. For example, when some apartment building has a violent problem tenant who threatens other tenants and won't clean up after his dog, someone would defend this man by saying that he can't really control his ramblings because of a stroke he suffered earlier, which also made him physically so immobile that he can't scoop the poop. Or, when somebody reacts to the post "The economics of marrying a foreign woman" at Marginal Revolution by mocking the Western men who go abroad to look for a wife as losers whom no Western woman would ever stoop down to.
Even though it's not that difficult to say "trying to refute somebody's argument by explaining why its conclusion is necessarily true", it would certainly be handy to have one word that would mean this. Would the English mavens reading this have any suggestions?
You might say that the westerner in search of a wife or the violent, filthy tenant were rebuQED.
But that only works in the past tense.
Posted by Anonymous | 10:48 AM
I've come across many of these losers and their wives. Who are we to pass judgement? I think it's a case of mutual advantage through marriage.
Posted by Lexcen | 4:18 PM