Month: March 2015

• March 14, 2015

  Insistence itself is in the wrong

  Your insistence begets your interlocutor’s (my) resistance, acquiescence, or consternation. You believe that P must be the right way of proceeding or Q is the right picture of the world and that we should act based on P or Q. And I react to your forceful, impactful words either by fighting against them (resistance), by giving in too easily yet…
• March 11, 2015

  Defining insistence

  A first go at a definition of insistence: Insistence is the firmly held conviction that the relevant agents would be best off were they to act based on (i) the belief that P is the right (or best) way to do things or (ii) the belief that Q is the right (best, most accurate, most coherent, etc.) view…
• March 6, 2015

  ‘No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers’ (Merton)

  Thomas Merton summarizes the teachings of Zhuang Zhou (Chuang Tzu) so beautifully: ‘No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.’ This is from The Way of Chuang Tzu. How wrong: wrong in a moral sense? Perhaps. But primarily wrong in an epistemic sense as in incorrect or mistaken, in error. Whence: ‘No one is…