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Archive for the ‘Language’ Category

If there were giants…

Posted in Cognition, Language, Thinking on June 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Daddy, is this true?  If there were giants, then a football to them would be the same size as a pea to us. That was, word for word, a completely out-of-the blue utterance by our 6 year old daughter, Lillian. Her “if…then” construct is what is known as a counter-factual conditional – If [something that [...]

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Why are legal arguments so hard to follow?

Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Language, Legal Argumentation, Rationale, Reasoning on August 13, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Judges use written judgements to convey the complex set of arguments supporting their decision. However it is difficult to extract the arguments from those written judgements, at the level of clarity and rigour demanded by good-quality argument mapping. This difficulty is due in large part to various aspects of traditional legal prose.

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Whately the …?

Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Language on July 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve often commented on how odd it is that argument mapping took so long to appear, only starting to take off in the past decade. After all, argument mapping is really just drawing diagrams showing the relationships among propositions in some piece of reasoning or argumentation on some topic we care about. It is a [...]

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Clichés have a silver lining

Posted in Business, Language on June 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

 The Telegraph is carrying a piece, At the end of the day, you’ve given 110 per cent, which mocks clichés – and implicitly, those who use them.  The piece contains ten or so winning entries in a competition to cram the most cliches into a short text. Interestingly, the word “cliché” doesn’t appear in the [...]

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