I folliow up on "Cat Couplings" from 2019 with a bunch of new examples and further thinking on how and why cat couplings work. Read more (13 min, 3300 words).
Cat Couplings Revisited
Tag: erisology
Fantasia for Two Voices
A dialog on how everything is. Read more (6 min, 1600 words).
Turnabout Trash: An Exercise in Lowbrow Cryptonormativism
I roleplay being a culture warrior in response to something unusually irritating, and decide not to do it again. Read more (15 min, 3800 words).
Picking Apart Eugenics
A quick-and-dirty piece on what the hell people mean by "eugenics", promted by the fallout from a tweet by Richard Dawkins.
Read more(7 min, 1700 words).
It’s Not So Only
Are mental illnesses actual illnesses or are they unusual preferences? Or maybe this is a non-issue because it's only about words? Well, that's not so only. Read more (8 min, 1900 words).
The End of 2019
I try to sum up 2019, a year that started out well but took a weird turn about a third of the way through. Read more (6 min, 1400 words.)
Erisology, Round Three
Third attempt at a relatively user-friendly introduction to what "erisology" means.
Read more (10 min, 2600 words).
Cat Couplings
"I prefer honest argumentation to dishonest rhetoric." Do I mean that rhetoric is essentially dishonest, or am I talking about the kind of rhetoric that's dishonest? That's a cat coupling. Read more (7 min, 1800 words).
Interpretation Matrix: Free Trade Benefits Everyone
Many disagreements are complicated by terms having several meanings. What if a claim is made up of more than one such term? How would we deal with that complexity? I look at an example about the benefits of free trade.
Read more (7 min, 1800 words).
The Prince and the Figurehead
When we misrepresent other people, is it a mistake or do we do it on purpose? Neither explanation feels right to me. Rather, I think we should consider that we often perform "semitentional" actions, which is the result of our agency being more distributed than we think.
Read more (6 min, 2900 words).
