"I would think that reasonable people might possibly have their opinion effected by current events.

Would you?"

"Effected" or "affected?" Either way, sure. What I don't understand is why you presume that just because you haven't heard people say something one way or another, that somehow people must not have an opinion, or that they must be afraid to express that opinion, or must be waiting for word from Glenn as to what their opinion "should be."

To put it another way, I bet plenty of contributors here have their opinion either affected or effected by the advent of the debate season, but some simply may not wish to share those opinions at this time, if at all.

I see little evidence it has to do with the "fear" you cited previously.

No kings,

Robert

Between Mona running around going "Neener, neener... Glenn links approvingly to Cato..." and the other one thinking that just because some of Glenn's articles are posted at Lew Rockwell this makes him an "Austrian" Rockwellian, it's like they don't even wait until they've "passed on" before baptizing them as "Libertarians".

Uh-huh. Except that it happens to be true that Glenn has repeatedly linked to either Cato or one of its associates in an approving manner. It is also true that as I informed bucky1, he can't read anything into Glenn's posts appearing at Lew Rockwell because Glenn let's anyone republish him. I further advised that I have given Glenn my opinion regarding Lew Rockwell (more particularly, his association with Gary North), and rather apparently Glenn did not find my objections sufficient reason to disallow Lew from republishing him. (I feel free to report my side of these emails, but not to delve too much into what Glenn privately told me in reply.)

Given Glenn's current time constraints I will report he is intending to neither endorse nor repudiate Lew Rockwell by allowing republication there, which is my perception of views he has stated to me via email. I don't think he'd mind my saying that; I hope not.

BTW, I never "baptized" Glenn as anything ideologically. Tho I have on occasion noted that he once said in pre-Haloscan comments that he most often agrees with those who describe themselves as libertarians. Of course, Jeff Goldstein fancies that he (Jeff) is a libertarian, so obviously there is room to maneuver in that definition.

Well, that's your job, as a neuroscientist, to figure out, innit?

Or maybe to figure out whether there is a problem with the logic.

As for how it's unpacked, well, as you say, decoding the logical steps as well as the culture-specific allusions might take any number of steps to replicate what is in fact communicated to the properly tuned in an instant. Human pattern recognition is an amazing thing...

This is an amazingly complex sentence and a half. Fundamentally, the question I was asking was whether your properly tuned in instant fits into finitely many any number of steps or whether human pattern recognition is an oxymoron (aaggghh, I really hope that sentence made sense).

at the end of the forty minutes a little light blinked and suddenly the phrase "Mad cow disease is caused by depression" made complete logical sense, even though its explanation was only in metaphor

This is the second time this backward looking logical sense has been cited since I wandered on to this topic last night, the first time was

- yes, but they only do that afterwards - not before. The logically plausible steps are unconfirmable and therefore, potentially, irrelevant. If you are working on the difference between logical steps and metaphoric insight, why do you try to turn the metaphors into logical steps before accepting them? (certifiedprepwn3D)

So, with much thanks to all on this, suppose I say that metaphor is a series of steps like this

A-->A-->A-->...

---------------> time

where each A is an analogy. And logic is

A<--A<--A<--...

---------------> time

I actually really like this explanation. In essence it says that mathematics is poetry (h/t IntrovertGirl) because rather than poetry being that form of communicating where words have more meanings, logic is that form of poetry where words have fewer meanings.

Where there was nothing, poof now there is something. Where was it packed before it was delivered?

Maybe it wasn't.

One can only imagine how rich and how laconic such a language could be, yet how difficult it would be to reconcile it with any science worthy of the name.

or how rich the science it produced would be. Have you seen Haboken Landscape by Sesshu? Do you know anyone who sees somthing other than a landscape?

sorry to all the others for the OT.

splashed ink.

Oh, it's not a question of talking with my mother. She talks; you listen. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes not, and many themes are repeated. My mother's the only person I know to whom I'd have to say, "Mother dear, it's my birthday. Can we not talk about coal mining killing virgin prairie, and the benzene ring [oil] being the world-killing snake of Native American mythology, just today?"

What interesting contrasts between two writers I've never thought of putting together. While I like both, Willa Cather is one of my favorites, as her own writing is evidence of her statement that a writer's work should "grow out of the land beneath her (his? their? ACK!) feet."

You've made me think about novels suddenly in a different way. We all know, I suppose, that some writers' strength is in the plot (logical progression), while others' strength is in the inspection of characters or scene or psychological insight (metaphor). But I've never really applied it in the way you're talking about. Have to think about it more now.

Your pictograph (hieroglyph?) makes sense. I think. Logical argument does move forward in time, but you have to reverse the logic from the conclusion in order to build the steps, whereas metaphor is a series of story-in-steps that (following a logical progression that might be hidden to its creator) lead somewhere, but we don't know where that is until we get to it.

We're used to thinking of mathematics as the purest application of logic. But in mathematical research that's only really true once the discoveries are made. Getting there is just as seemingly randomly creative as the next science or art; the dependence on logic comes in proving,/i> that the conclusion can be reached by the steps made.

I think Arthur Koestler laid out some of these arguments in The Ghost in the Machine, his book about psychology, in which he particularly focused on creativity and the 'Eureka!' moment in scientific discovery. I don't remember the specifics very well, but part of his point was that flashes of insight don't come out of the blue. Rather, they come out of an infinitesimal build-up of seemingly inconsequential pieces of fact, discovery, conversation, visual stimulation, unrelated research, etc.