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Posts Tagged ‘Michael Gilbert’

Burden of proof and intellectual property

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , on January 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

Do PIPA and SOPA threaten to reverse legal burden of proof in the US?  Clay Shirky argues they do.  I don’t know enough about the legal system, or the proposed legislation.  However, this is a serious allegation with implications far beyond the US.

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Dancing an Explanation

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , on December 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Some readers of RAIL may already with John Bohannon’s brilliant competition Dance your PhD.  In the video below, given at a TED event in Brussels, Bohannon generalizes the point that Dance your PhD essentially makes: Explanations can be effectively delivered in any number of ways.  Though the suggestion that dancers might replace the ubiquitous and dreaded PowerPoint is a bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure, I think that the observations Bohannon makes here about it’s pitfalls are spot on and worthy of consideration.

I have to admit that I’m also seized with curiosity as to how or even whether this could be done with arguments.  At the very least the results would put a whole new “spin” on Michael Gilbert‘s theory of visceral argument. 🙂

Enjoy.

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Deep Disagreement: A Lesson from the Jewish Tradition

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Informal Logic, tagged , , , , on August 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Mulling over deep disagreement (again) I came across this nice little piece by David Suissa at the Huffington Post from a little over a year ago.  In it he talks about the traditional Jewish narrative of the houses of Shammai and Hillel, who differed over how to interpret the Jewish law (Shammai insisted on strict adherence, while Hillel counseled in favor of compassion):

This idea of looking at more than one “truth” is at the heart of the epic debate in the Talmud between the house of Shammai, which represents the strict, uncompromising voice of Jewish law, and the house of Hillel, which represents the more lenient voice.

Rabbi Moti Bar-Or, who runs Kolot, a bridge-building Torah study institution in Israel, explained to me that “the uniqueness of Hillel is that he truly believes there is validity in the Shammai approach, although he totally disagrees with him.”
In Shammai’s world, there’s “no room for pluralism” because it’s the world of “true or false.” It is Hillel’s ability to see the other side, Bar-Or says, that makes Judaism follow his approach today — not the fact that he was “smarter or right.”

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