Chapter 2: Argument—Fine Classification, Coarse Reasoning¶

[PLANNED] This chapter has not yet been written; what follows is a skeleton. Items may be added or removed, and the order may change.

What this chapter does. No judgment on doctrine here; only on how the book reaches doctrine. The backbone claim: the capacity for classification and the capacity for argument are not of the same order, and the gap has a fixed cause — the same set of distinctions that works as a precision instrument in the classificatory work never takes the field in the argumentative work. The conclusion is not that the book cannot think: the passage on memory in fascicle twelve, omniscience and free will in fascicle eleven, the dilemma of the atoms in fascicle one hundred thirty-two are the book at its best. The weakness is in argument, not in intelligence.

Structure. Sixteen sections, already fixed; titles only: the standard of measurement (taken from the book's own opening claim to be conducting a debate); the two levels of reductio; the inertia of the table; false dilemmas and question-begging; example in place of analysis, similes broken but never unpacked; the slippery slope; arguments from a missing option and the terminus of no-liberation; the double standard (rule laid down, apparatus built, rule broken); three answers stacked without noticing their exclusion; "this should not be pressed," a sentence that never counts; the stopping points of argument (scripture as measure, flat denial, appeal to the nature of things); "for the sake of the text"; the stretch of name and entity; proportion (the positive samples, and the mechanism of instruments built but never used); evidence placed out of reach; substance first, argument after. The last section closes the chapter and is the first beam of the Chapter 9 verdict.

Data and sources. Section-by-section samples and fascicle references are fixed in the planning file: mainly fascicles nine through thirteen, sixteen through eighteen, thirty, seventy-three and seventy-four, one hundred thirty-two, one hundred fifty-eight; the twenty-seven cases that declare every position faulty and then rule have been read one by one and the proportions computed. Writing draws its samples from there; nothing new is hunted up.

To Chapter 3. With the state of the argument laid out, the question lands on the rulings: where argument cannot settle a matter, what does.