Miscellaneous additions to our
essay on the logic and rhetoric of modus
tollens,
(1) Psychological observations
People seldom intuit what is
unpalatable to them. [Moreover,
one can] eliminate any undesirable indirect implication of their special
insight by means of an additional hilfs-intuition, liquidating the
embassassing logical relation.
-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in
Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 95
In short, one ‘answers’ the
sceptic by striding across logical
gaps to conclusions inconsistent
with premises that one does not contest.
-- John Watkins, Science and Scepticism
(1984), p. 34
(2) The reductio ad absurdum /”self-mate” gambit:
The traditional argument for the
primacy of acceleration-retardation
rests on the absurdity of denying it.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny
and Phylogeny (1977), p. 216
Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures,
which is regarded by some as a foundation-stone for this kind of activity, has
been described by no less an authority than Roman Jakobson as an argumentum a contrario
(Jakobson, 1959), showing the impossibility of the whole enterprise.
-- Hilary Putnam, “Some Issues in
the Theory of Grammar”, in Mind,
Language, and Reality (1975), p. 85
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