A True Blogger's Boring Truth

In the collective mind

the intellectual aptitudes

of the individuals,

and in consequence

their individuality,

are weakened.

--Gustav Le Bon,

La Pscychologie des Foules,

1895

To be truthful, I wasn't terribly excited about my assignment for this blog. Perhaps that's because it was just that: a blogorrhea, the term coined by a Deaf blogger. My esteemed self requested a story about true-false argments. Given my history with such linguistics, I was not optimistic about the completion of this blog.

Nothing is more natural to vlogs (video-logs) that Deaf people make in American Sign Language (ASL) than argument. We try to convince anyone we are arguing with that we are right, that our conclusion is truth and therefore better for them to accept and follow. It would be no good if we could not tell if our truth followed from another. What is often passed off in vlogs as a truth that does not fit the bill. There's a saying that goes like this: "There is nothing to link the truth of the conclusion to the truth of the supporting claims."

Studying ASL is what makes logic unique and exceptional. It is the study of truth-preserving arguments. William C. Stokoe first gave us the idea of a language as a tool to claim convincingly that ASL is another way of thinking. This study of ASL should include grammar (parameters: hand shapes, palm positions, onset-coda locations, non-manual expressions, and modifier movements), rhetoric and, more importantly, a theory of interpretation.

The truth of ASL has an effect on the truth of interpretation. Gottfried Liebniz (1646-1716) came up with an argument tool: "reductio ad absurdum." What follows constitutes a boring paragraph:

We can divide interpretations by this argument tool into two categories, those which argue against a theory by viewing ASL as something extremely absurd, and those which derive a formal interpretation from the theory, for example by showing that an ethical theory recommends supporting ASL in the same situation. Obviously the first kind of interpretation is much a weaker counter-argument because even an absurd thing can be true. Thus a carefully crafted philosophical theory that explains ASL could not be rejected just because it makes an unintuitive claim. (Not all Deaf people around the world use ASL.) There are, however, two kinds of philosophical interpretations that such a reductio is absurd, boring and confusing.

Back to my first paragraph, I told myself, "It's all about getting my readers into a boring social cognition by experiencing a blogorrhea. It's also about getting truth nerds into a real argument--something this blogger is still trying not to be truthfully bored.