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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (99183)	2/8/2005 8:57:50 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

If all you mean to say is that logically (ABCDE) doesn't include F (or in other words 5 traits that Bush and Kim Jong Il might possibly have in common, don't mean they have other traits in common), than we agree... Good. I thought we would. ...and I think the other people objecting to the article would also agree. That was not my impression. What started this were the comments of the blog: "Yep, and it's getting harder and harder to ignore the hundreds of thousands of americans languishing in concentration camps, and the millions who are starving to death. I myself won't even listen to the radio for fear my family will be sent to a re-education camp. Most of my family is subsisting on grass these days and it is death to criticise Bush... Even when he goes out and inexplicably frees millions from tyrrany under false pretexts of grabbing their oil, dissent is not allowed! Oh, what a state.." This guy is asserting the inclusion of F. I challenged that and was opposed. Ergo, the opposition was asserting F, as well, seems to me. The objection is to the use of this rhetorical device to cause people to think F (or f). It's possible that others were conflating the use of the rhetorical device with the inclusion with F as they were arguing the inclusion of F. But then that brings us to the crux of the matter. Regardless of the intent of the author-- whether he was just trying to catch the reader's eye with his hook, manipulating the reader with a rhetorical device, or pulling a Hitler on Bush--the reader's believing that the author asserted F is not cognitively sound. The objection is to the use of this rhetorical device to cause people to think F (or f). You want to blame the author for creating an environment where readers mistakenly think F. Fine. He either did it on purpose or could reasonably be expected to have anticipated the possibility of that result. But what about the reader? If all you mean to say... So, what I meant to say was both that F is not included and also that the reader has some responsibility for his perception that it was. There are many reasons why the reader might respond as though the author had actually asserted F that are on the reader, regardless of any alleged provocation. The reason I brought this up in the first place was, as I said back in post zero, as an example of a common phenomenon where readers make invalid inferences, create from them a strawman, and then attribute that strawman to the author. There are examples galore hereabouts. (I found one right in my inbox this morning.) I find the phenomenon interesting.

To: TimF who wrote (99183)	2/8/2005 8:58:05 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

On the subject of rhetorical devices, here's one I've been following lately--the enthymeme. This device first came to my attention during the buildup to in a WaPo piece by Paul Waldman. <<This is an example of what scholars of rhetoric call <enthymematic argumentation>. In an enthymeme, the speaker builds an argument with one element removed, leading listeners to fill in the missing piece. On May 1, speaking from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on. . . . With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." This is classic enthymematic argumentation: We were attacked on Sept. 11, so we went to war against Iraq. The missing piece of the argument -- "Saddam was involved in 9/11" -- didn't have to be said aloud for those listening to assimilate its message.>> The reason this has been on my mind is that we are seeing the technique again re SS. The pitch on SS reform is that 1)SS is going broke and 2)private accounts will produce a better benefit. The missing piece, left to the reader, is that private accounts will fix SS's finances, which is, of course, singularly untrue. The plan relies on benefit cuts to do that. Private accounts are a separate matter.