(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 9

[Nick Lee]

 Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:41:10 -0600 James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>

> I think the Logician term for that is "tit for tat". And here is an
> applicable opportunity to address the motives of a writer to understand
> his text. It would be a valid refutation of Wright's arguments to say
> that it is circular and that there is a reasonable probability that it
> exemplifies what he attempts to debunk. That would have been a good
> argument from the vantage of hindsight.


I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. "Tit for tat" is a strategy
in game theory (which I haven't studied much) rather than classical
logic, but I don't think it applies here. Unless I'm missing something? It's
kind of a complicated concept. I suppose the difficulty is in deriving your
antecdent for "that" (not "tat").

Accusation of circular reasoning is not always a way to refute the argument,
because circular reasoning can be valid. You'd have to explain precisely how
Wright's argument is circular in order to ascertain its fallaciousness. In
any case, Wright's reasoning is more complex than that, as others have
testified.

Wright doesn't argue that *Sun* has no religious or moral interpretations.
He instead asserts that different reader expectations, religious and mythic,
prevent them from noticing the physicalist details, and that Wolfe plays
(preys?) on this tendency. I don't see how his reasoning is circular. Not to
speak for Wright, but knowing something about reader response theory, I
think he would say that a religious interpretation of Wolfe is valid as long
as it still takes the subtext into account, i. e. the hierogrammates'
conspiracy.
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