Jef's web files - Rhetoric

Rhetoric

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 11:07:56 -0400

Notes on communicating effectively and persuasively.

Between Truth and Lies, an Unprintable Ubiquity

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:53:56 -0500

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

The Two Cultures

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 09:25:23 -0500

"I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"
- CP Snow

A kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture...

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 20:31:29 -0400

If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
- Carl Sagan

My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes...

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:50:38 -0400

Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel 'threatened' by science-studies scholars. My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots.
- Alan Sokal

The Woolly-Thinker's Guide to Rhetoric

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:47:15 -0400

Here you'll find top tips for besting your enemies. As employed by the world's best woolly-thinkers. Learn, for example: how to play the 'biological reductionist' card to maximum effect; how 'language games' can help you out of a sticky situation; and how lucky it is that 'truth' is relative to particular discourses (especially yours).

Fashionable Dictionary

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:38:39 -0400

Your guide to the language of pseudoscience and fashionable nonsense. Written by woolly-thinkers for woolly thinkers. A must read for post-modernists, dialectical biologists, Gaia theorists and Freudians.

Butterflies and Wheels

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 12:10:31 -0400

Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include:

Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.

Refutation of Bishop Berkely

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:47:40 -0400

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
- Boswell

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Sun, 30 May 2004 14:23:04 -0400

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter
Copyright 1979