ilstar

Here is an enlightening post, which proves that all of you have been correct.

No problem, Michael. I've banned the evil person from my blog. It's over. I am continuing to post there, and I know that everything now is going to be all right.

All that matters is to try to prevent incommensurability, and I've tried as much as I could. Our incommensurability is not so extreme, however. It is probably of a pragmatic variety. That's very funny, Michael, especially considering that I've mentioned a real person who could help identify the fraud. But you don't get my pragmatics and see only what you want to see, not my actual words. Oh well.

Sometimes communication cannot solve a problem.

I will ban that person, if xxxxxxxxxxxxxx replies to me by saying that she does not know any of these people. And you can restrict me, Michael, all you want, since I know that it is meaningless to seek alliance with you or your forum members. This forum goes the same way as OO for me.

Sorry, that was a misspelling on my part. Indeed, "the heuristic."

Michael, so you think that her simplification of Kahneman's heuristics to "the heuristics" (potentially to save time rather than explain all of them) is the best argument to show that she is crazy and fake? Do you regret thinking that "Eva has a fine mind" and "a beautiful mind as it matures" (link)? You surely aren't her "kindred spirit" now or "resonate with that spirit" (ibid.). All this proves to me is that you rushed in your evaluations of Eva, and potentially you hurried when you banned her as well. And to think that I am Eva or those type of people who write "daffy-nition" and such is ridiculous. You know you can tell from the writing style about the person? Does my style remind you of how Eva, Andie, or Bill write? Please, do not rush with your decisions or judgements. Judgements based on false premises lead to contradictions.

Okay, Michael, I will look at more of his posts.

You recollect correctly, tmj, except it wasn't a blog post but a non-fiction essay I wrote for a graduate class. Yes, I served in the Russian army, but that was in 2009-10, many years after I had already experienced life in the USA. Although Michael explicitly stated I should not mention their names or argue about them, I am going to keep this comment short: those-who-shall-not-be-named are more qualified and knowledgeable in philosophy and science than I am.

I had in mind "discerning the available means of persuasion," apparent and real, yeah.

I have no problem with Aristotle's definition. In fact it is perfectly fine and ethical. But to connect rhetoric to incommensurability in my previous statement to Michael, this definition works clearer, and Wolf used it as I intended. Indeed, if he doesn't want to talk to me and doesn't care about what I think - it leads the road to incommensurability. To close oneself to other ideas is to separate from or desynchronize with other people and their discourse communities. Sexual rhetoric, sure, and sports rhetoric. As long as you are not walking away from a meaningful communication or synchronization with other people like Wolf does, you are perfectly fine.

For my own purposes, I've defined rhetoric before as "a meaningful synchronization of a human in relationship with a specific discourse community."

I won't close my eyes on it -- that's my decision. I shall remain with my eyes widely open, however "painful" it can get. As it is written in The Fountainhead: "It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain."

Ilya, Why, that's right! It doesn't make sense, but that's not on us. Crazy people do crazy stuff. Why? Because they are crazy. They are not supposed to make sense. They can't not not make sense even if they wanted to. I suppose you could call not engaging them running away from a problem, but curing neurotics is for psychotherapists, not philosophers. The fundamental issue on the table is crazy, not philosophy. And you don't get to change that with a crazy person. He or she won't let you. But they will make you crazy along with them. That's all they want and all they do. Besides, one should charge money for trying to cure neuroses in another. On a different, far better issue, Lakoff and Johnson's book on metaphor is just now coming up to the top of my reading list. After I get into it, I will be interested in your thoughts. Michael Michael, I take issue with people calling people crazy. I really think it is a poor rhetoric because once you call your opponent crazy, the argument may abruptly end and violence may begin. Objectivists, Marxists, and Harris/Andie have called me crazy before. I tolerated their attacks for the sole reason that I know the outcome of not engaging in rhetoric. The outcome is called incommensurability, and it's as anti-Aristotelian as it can get.

I am from Orel, but I think I want to move to Moscow. We have a Chomskyan-infested linguistics department, so I know very little of true semantics from my professors. We have a Chomskyan student and the leading linguistics professor at NIU, Professor Gulsat Aygen. When I asked her about semantics in a linguistic typology seminar, she said something along the lines: "Oh that's like going back to what Aristotle said..." So I asked her: "And what did Aristotle say?" To which she never replied for the reason of making a row and hence ending our "argument." And from studying Lakoff, I learn arguments against formal semantics, yet which also disentangle semantics from generative syntax. Nonetheless, I think Lakoff's semantics is a lot closer to genuine Aristotle's essentialist view than Chomsky's semantic-puppeteering syntax.