Satisfying non-explanations: an intriguing non-dream about ball lightning

My interest in explanations was brought to a new higher intensified while I watched a movie. I must regress many more years to tell the entire story. Before I begin, though, I need to assure you that my story is absolutely true.

About 20 years ago, I awoke at about 3 a.m., and I saw the strangest thing. A small orb with a soft greenish glow hovered five feet over my bedroom floor, about an arm’s length out from the foot of the bed. The orb was about the size of a ping-pong ball. I walked toward the orb until my face was one foot from the orb. I tried to see if I could account for the glowing ball by checking for an external source of reflected light through the bedroom windows. I couldn’t find any such external light source, though. The orb itself was glowing and it was still in my bedroom. I considered touching the orb with my hand, but I didn’t. For a moment, I wondered whether it would try to communicate with me—a strange thought, given that I have never believed in disembodied sentience.

I noticed that the orb was slowly descending. It didn’t make any noise. After 30 seconds of descending, the orb reached the floor, then it took the shape of a sunny-side up egg as it melted into the bedroom floor. I went downstairs from my second floor bedroom to the first floor to see whether the orb was “melting” through the …

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The joy of subsumption

All my life I’ve been suspicious of the alleged power of syllogisms.  Here is an often-cited syllogism:

• All men are mortal
• Socrates is a man
• Therefore Socrates is mortal

Syllogisms can be expressed in this logical form:

• All B’s are C
• A is a B
• Therefore, A is C

The above example is a perfect syllogism: the conclusion naturally follows from the premises.  Syllogisms constitute deductive reasoning (from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow).

Many excellent thinkers and writers have stressed the need to present one’s arguments in terms of syllogisms.   For example, in his excellent book on legal writing, The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner advises lawyers to frame every legal issue as a syllogism (see p. 88).

But what is really behind the power of syllogisms?   It turns out that they are actually based on a metaphor—the metaphor of objects in a box.  Consider this diagram in tandem with the classic syllogism (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal”)

syllogism.JPG

As Judge Posner points out (in “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism,” 86 Mich L. Rev 827, 830 (1988)), the first premise presents a box labeled “all men,” in which each of the contents are each labeled “mortal” and one of those objects is labeled “Socrates.”  Posner notes,

“The second premise tells us that everything in the box is tagged with a name and that one of the tags says “Socrates.”  When we pluck Socrates out of the

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