Thanks for your kind words Penguin. I started writing this response shortly after your article came out, but got bogged down by my own overambitiousness. Since you requested it, I tried to diagram those parts of this essay which are diagrammable, but I didn’t have much luck. Most of it isn’t diagrammable, because it tells a bit of your personal story, then states your personal beliefs about how cool I am using some vivid metaphors. (The first time I’ve ever been compared to a musclebound werewolf, but of course there are muscles and there are muscles.) when you write as the penguin, You interlace story and argument so intricately that the reader often doesn’t feel like they are being argued with.Often you have multiple conclusions which are only evocatively connected by similarities of subject.This is not a bad thing, in fact it’s one of the great strengths of your style. Most people would rather read a story than an argument anyway, because arguments served straight up feel like attacks if the reader disagrees with the conclusion. But it does mean that you have to trim back a lot of that flowery flesh to get to the bones of the argument.
I chose that gruesome mixed metaphor deliberately. whenever we translate natural language into logical English, We destroy the personal style of the writer, and replace it with something that can be found in everyone’s writing, from the banal to the profound. that underlying structure is monkeybutt ugly, but so is a car when you’ve laid all the parts out on the garage floor. you can’t drive the car in that condition, but you can fix it.
So rather than analyze the whole argument, I’ll analyze the one specific argument you started to analyze yourself.
“that’s why I’m better at logic than I was. Penguin got better at logic because of Teed’s intervention.”
You probably thought this was a modus ponens because the second sentence contains the word “because“. you could use the formula for modus ponens to translate that sentence.
if Teed intervened, penguin got better at logic
Teed intervened
Therefore penguin got better at logic
An argument however is not just a set of propositions. It’s a speech act performed by using those propositions in a certain social context. in order for this to function as the speech act modus ponens, it has to be a widely acknowledged fact that Teed intervened, and that when Teed intervenes people usually become better at logic.This, alas, is probably not a widely acknowledged fact amongst your readers, so it is not likely to perform that function. Furthermore, you are not writing that sentence to convince the reader that you have become better at logic. on the contrary, you are implying that they probably noticed that you have recently become better at logic and you want to start the conversation from there.
But wait a bit! “Penguin got better at logic” is the conclusion of the modus ponens. The argument ends there it doesn’t start there. The new idea that you want to plant in the reader’s head is the first sentence: that when Teed intervened, Penguin became better at logic. In other words the premise and the conclusions have traded functions. When this happens, the same set of propositions is called an explanation. The structure is exactly the same for an explanation as it is for a modus ponens. The only difference is which propositions are taken for granted as true. if the “conclusion“ is widely accepted as true, it becomes an explanandum, and the two premises are called explanans, whose function is to explain why the explanandum is true. if the premises are taken for granted, and this shared acceptance is used to persuade someone to accept conclusion, then it is a modus ponens
I say more about this in this article here.
P. S. My system can’t take caffeine anymore, so I can’t drink either coffee or tea. But I’d be glad to offer you some roibose and sushi, if you ever are out this way.
