Comments on: Is “imminent” transitive?

By: Moore Tania Williamson

Moore Tania Williamson — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 22:54:27 +0000

Unusual ideas can make enemies.

By: acline

acline — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 03:22:29 +0000

Zizka...The Rhetorica Network is dedicated to disseminating basic knowledge of rhetoric. Check out the Critical Meter and the Rhetoric Primer.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 00:13:44 +0000

Enthymemes is the word of the day. It showed up somewhere else (Calpundit or Yglesias). It’s a pity the concept isn’t more widely diffused.

By: mitch

mitch — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:21:12 +0000

Now if only all that intellectual firepower was involved in debating a proposition like, The US government has secretly believed for ten years that Iraq is an Al Qaeda sponsor, and has acted accordingly throughout that time. (Exhibit A for the affirmative side being comment 5 here.)

By: acline

acline — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:07:12 +0000

While I appreciate a good linguistic parsing, from my discipline the answer to what Bush claimed about WMDs, threats, links to terrorists ,etc., i.e. his persuasive intent, seems quite clear. From an entry on Rhetorica last week in regard to his UN address prior to the war: “Literalists will argue that Bush never said in so many words yadda yadda yadda. This willfully misunderstands rhetoric. Bush didn’t have to say it in so many words. The pathos and enthymemes of the speech did the persuading. Aristotle, 2,300 years ago, demonstrated how to get an audience to complete an argument by adding in the stuff that isn’t specifically said.”

By: Jonathan Ichikawa

Jonathan Ichikawa — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 19:07:28 +0000

This looks like a straight-forward anti-Sorites kind of argument to me… “imminent” is very similar to “really close”, which is not strictly transitive unless it allows Providence to be “really close” to Taiwan. But like you say, this a short chain… so while the principle you say Bush is committed to (that “imminent” is not transitive) looks true, the whole story is somewhat more dubious.

By: Barry

Barry — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:12:19 +0000

“Not so with Iraq because they had booted out the inspectors, thus making them threatening as to their intentions.” Freddie, when did Saddam do this? IIRC, the inspectors were withdrawn before Desert Fox, and were re-admitted when in 2002 (or ‘03).

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 16:54:41 +0000

Fuzzy logic, right? Daniel has been spending too much time with the philosophers. In the context of the actual political argument, what’s primarily significant is the whole swarm of administration statements about Saddam’s threat during the runup to the war vote in September 02. (And secondarily, the statements during the period between the war vote and the actual war). Not just the statements in which the word “imminent” was actually used. In at least one place Bush specifically disavowed that word. But elsewhere we were repeatedly given the impression that a WMD attack on the US itself might be possible at any time. The scaremongering may not have included many clear and definite statements, but that was the gist of it, and it was disseminated very aggressively. To me, when the defenders of the original scare campaign rely on its vagueness and confusion to defend it—and that is what they’re doing—it really compounds the original dishonesty. In the same way, people will claim that juxtaposing photos of Saddam and Sen. Cleland, for example, was not definitely saying that there was a relationship between the two. And no, it wasn’t, but it’s not less reprehensible. If anything, it’s more so.

By: Xhenxhefil

Xhenxhefil — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 16:17:28 +0000

OK, on behalf of the left I admit that Bush did not intend us to believe the danger was imminent. As theological hairsplitters know, “imminent” means “about to take place”, while “immanent” means “already present everywhere”. Clearly the message was that the threat was “immanent”, or already existent. The war has not removed this threat, though, but it has instilled fear everywhere the threat supposedly exists.

By: Jeremy Osner`

Jeremy Osner` — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:52:09 +0000

D’oh! Sorry DD, forgot the beginning of the post before I got to the end.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:51:56 +0000

As a rule I’m happy to go by any title more polite (or at least no less impolite) than ‘that bastard’, so Mr is more than enough. It’s hard to see how a concept of ‘almost transitivity’ could be worked out coherently. Here’s the best I can do off the top of my head. Let’s say we’re working in a logic where the truth value of any proposition need not be 1 (i.e. true) or 0 (i.e. false) but can be some value in between. There’s plenty of logics like this, and while I don’t like them at all, they have lots of adherents. So any sentence S has a truth value v(S), which is higher the truer S is. The falsity value f(S) can be defined as 1-v(S). Within such a framework we can define a concept of almost transitivity: R is almost transitive iff for all a,b,c f(aRc) is less than or equal to f(aRb) + f(bRc). This is weaker than transitivity, and it’s plausible that ‘imminent’ is almost transitive. I’d be rather embarrassed if defending my position required appeal to wacky logical concepts like these. But it seems pretty clear that embarrassment is no problem for the defenders of the Bush/Blair line, so in a friendly spirit I offer them this proposal.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:32:46 +0000

You gotta wonder about some of our worthy conservative blogosphere mates. This is an argument that they shouldn’t even have started, let alone got so passionate about. Because in a political sense, they just can’t win. I’m sure Rove would just as soon not have the SOTU dredged up, because while they’re finely parsing it the rest of us are looking at the quotes and thinking how hysterical commies-at-the-door the whole tone of the thing was. And putting aside things Condi or Big Time Dick said, just because they didn’t come from Lord Dauphin himself, are exactly the type of technicalities that really disgust people- especially conservatives- when they are exposed in our judicial system. Didn’t they learn anything from the whole “definition of what ‘is’ is” mess??? Nobody cared what the answer was, because they were so taken aback by the sleazy air of the defense itself. So regardless of the “victor” the loser will be Bush. His is an administration that depends upon the short memory of the voting public. Dredging up stuff of even 6 months ago will do them no good.

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Jonathan Goldberg — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:17:23 +0000

Per the dsquared erratum: I’m of the old school, and hold that the title “Doctor” should be reserved for theologians. Some would put economists into that category, but not I.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:57:14 +0000

As indeed will the link at the beginning of the post, so now CT readers have a choice of links.

By: Jeremy Osner`

Jeremy Osner` — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:38:00 +0000

Sebastian Holsclaw and Jonathan Schwarz are debating this very question over at Daniel Drezner’s blog. This link: http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000816.html will take you to the beginning of the debate.