On Wednesday, August 14, 2002, at 12:49 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> At a certain level of abstraction dinosaurs = algae = Doug Henwood =
> dead oak tree.
at what level, precisely? far from being an apt analogy, i suspect this is entirely spurious and is itself a sophomoric argument, also often known as argumentum ad hominem.
>
> That particular level of abstraction is probably (just probably) not
> very interesting. But only for amateur ironists is there no recognition
> of the necessity of considering 'things' (_res_) at various levels of
> abstraction.
>
well, isn't the question what levels of abstraction are meaningful and/or useful? doug appears to me to be arguing (via reductio ad absurdum, which, far from being sophomoric, is a perfectly reasonable technique) that the level of abstraction you've been deploying is not very helpful. your response here is simply to defend abstraction rather than the high level of abstraction doug seems to be after. if anything, your analogy above proves his point, imo.
at least, afaict.
jeff the analogy police