Prometheus 6

Spotted this when Brad DeLong saved me the annoyance of reading McWhorter on TNR again. I subscribed to The Valve's feed to make sure I get all the discussion links.

The Trouble With Diversity: A Prelude
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 10/01/06 at 06:57 PM

As a prelude to next week’s discussion of The Trouble With Diversity, I’m providing some links to recent articles by and about Walter Benn Michaels and the conversaions they elicited. I’ll follow those with links to scholarly articles about the two books from which The Trouble With Diversity, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. draws its arguments.

In keeping with this, from Warrior Lessons II

Develop the practice of doing as little as possible when affecting things. It will require you to understand this most important thing as a process, make you understand the importance of change, timing and balance. Keeping the use of your resources as low as possible means you'll have more resources to deal with the inevitable unexpected.

I suggest becoming familiar with reductio ad absurdum arguments.

The advantage of reductio ad absurdum arguments are:

• it forces you out of justification mode and into discovery mode
• contradictions are easy to find if they exist
• you volunteer none of your own ideas to be attacked

Republished.

Steely resolve

This was going to be a comment elsewhere, but I decided I wanted to say it out loud, in general.

The first requirement is that you pursue what you think is the most important thing in the world. Without purpose there is no resolve. This most important thing can be a person, a principle, whatever. And it doesn't matter why it's the most important thing to you. All that matters is that it's something you enjoy, can see clearly, and see coming about.

Choose carefully…your will in related areas will be as strong as the area's relationship to your focus, and your will in general will get stronger from the exercise but only in this one thing you can be unbreakable.

From: Seeing Reason: Image and Language in Learning to Think
by Keith Stenning
page 73

Logic makes a radical distinction between discovery of a logical or mathematical proof and justification. Logic provides a mechanical criterion of justification. A conclusion is logically justified if it appears in a sequence of steps of derivation all of which follow from the problem statement or earlier derivations from it by one or other of the rules of inference. Each rule application is 'small' enough that it can be checked mechanically. But how we are to find such a chain of rule applications is a matter of discovery. Discovery can be (and historically has been) by dream, hallucination or revelation. Logic does have something to say about discovery, but by far its most intense focus is on the apparatus of justification, and on the very concept of justification itself.