Thouless, Booktalk, and the Eternal Rabbit

[Jeremy1952]

Ok, another tic in our mess of a database: I just finished Thouless and Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking, recommended by Tiarella; I can't continue the thread where we already started talking about it, because it is in a previous "suggestions" thread which is locked.Anyway the book rocks. You'd think these rhetorical tricks would be obvious: and they are, when someone lays them out. Since starting the book they've been jumping out at me all over the place. The most basic insight is the degree to which most arguments contain no argument at all: that is, they are all about form and skip over substance all together. When brandished by good rhetoreticians, such arguments can throw logical/scientifc types like ourselves way off. In fact, I think that is what former President Reagan was really all about; he presented practically nothing better than anyone else. And what fact counters nothing? If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett, 1984