Sorting Through Sophistries: Context Is King
The problem with fallacies like cherry-picking is that every word, sentence, book, and thought is meaningful only within its context.
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Texts in Context: The Age of the Bronze Men
The atmosphere of the Bronze Age, alien as it is to us today, may appear savage at first glance; but this belies a very different quality that can be discerned in its literature …
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Sorting Through Sophistries: Tu Quoque, Brute
A catch in the whole system of logic is the same thing as what makes it work in the first place: it is no “respecter of persons.”
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Texts in Context: Now We’re Getting Somewhen
Strange shapes move half-visibly in the mists of time; but as the grey recedes, often as not, we seem to find not a window but a mirror.
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Sorting Through Sophistries: The Hominem Family
We here at the CLT Journal are not here to assign blame. That’s for the tu quoque to do.
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Texts in Context: The Age of Saturn
Disentangling traditional myth, archæological fact, and anthropological speculation is a tricky business, which—in a lucky break for historians—can be left to prehistorians.
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Sorting Through Sophistries: Appeals to Authority
Sorting Through Sophistries:Appeals to Authority By Gabriel Blanchard Is it an error in reasoning to appeal to authority for one’s beliefs? Certainly not; but then again, very much
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Texts in Context: History & Its Discontents
History can be tricky, even when one is not being pursued by a rough-and-tumble college professor declaring that the artifact we are trying to study “belongs in a museum.”
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Sorting Through Sophistries: Mental Solitaire
Regrettably, we don’t always need someone else to lead us down the garden path of sophistry; we’re very capable walkers, thanks, and feel sure we can find it unassisted.
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Texts in Context: The Crocodile of Chronology
Time is sometimes depicted as an ouroboros, a serpent eating its tail, a symbol of cyclical recurrence. History is like a bask of crocodiles: they are related to snakes, but have extra features that may distract us, to our peril.
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