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Slovenian Lectures
cause I have established a scalar relationship between the two properties of
warmth-heat [chaleur] and pleasantness. There again, I am beaten at my
own game: you are saying “So, when the degree of warmth-heat is extreme
(the Sahara desert is considered as one of the hottest places in the world), one
should also have an extreme degree of pleasantness”. As that is obviously false,
my argument comes out looking unreasonable. And if you study real ar-
guments and real controversies, you will often see that type of refutation
being used. I recall an argument which I jotted down at a time when, in
France, the reduction of the school-syllabi was being discussed. A number
of so-called market-orientated teaching specialists contended that children
would learn far better if they were given fewer things to learn. Somewhere,
I had found the following argument put forward by someone who precisely
was against the cut: “For those people, schools will be perfect when noth-
ing at all is taught there any more”. That is a typical use of the exaggeration
strategy. You go right up the scales of a topos till you reach a result which is
generally considered as unacceptable, and thereby you think that you have
successfully refuted your addressee.
You could object that sometimes people base their arguments on prin-
ciples which are not scalar. Let us suppose, for example, that someone has
been murdered, even here say, at four thirty, and that he has been stabbed to
death (a very important detail for my demonstration). The culprit is being
looked for and the police suspect a certain French linguist who is present-
ly in Ljubljana: that linguist had reasons to resent his victim, who had been
very unpleasant about the theory of argumentation in general and about
scalarity in particular; moreover, the wound could very well have been
made with the dagger which that linguist usually has in his luggage. At that
moment of the inquiry, a new piece of information reaches the police: the
information that at four thirty, the time of the crime, the French linguist
was at his hotel and obviously could not have stabbed someone here. In vir-
tue of the following argument, he is found not guilty: “It cannot be him, as
he was at his hotel at four thirty”. Such an example does seem to show that
the principles which arguments rest upon are not necessarily scalar. In that
case, the argument rests on a principle according to which When a person
is not in a place, he cannot do anything there, and there seems to be nothing
scalar about that principle at all.
Up to me then to show you now that there is something scalar in the ar-
gument in question. We are going to stick to the same situation. Well, the
police have just received the information that at four thirty, the linguist was
at his hotel. Then, all of a sudden, some more information reaches them ac-
cause I have established a scalar relationship between the two properties of
warmth-heat [chaleur] and pleasantness. There again, I am beaten at my
own game: you are saying “So, when the degree of warmth-heat is extreme
(the Sahara desert is considered as one of the hottest places in the world), one
should also have an extreme degree of pleasantness”. As that is obviously false,
my argument comes out looking unreasonable. And if you study real ar-
guments and real controversies, you will often see that type of refutation
being used. I recall an argument which I jotted down at a time when, in
France, the reduction of the school-syllabi was being discussed. A number
of so-called market-orientated teaching specialists contended that children
would learn far better if they were given fewer things to learn. Somewhere,
I had found the following argument put forward by someone who precisely
was against the cut: “For those people, schools will be perfect when noth-
ing at all is taught there any more”. That is a typical use of the exaggeration
strategy. You go right up the scales of a topos till you reach a result which is
generally considered as unacceptable, and thereby you think that you have
successfully refuted your addressee.
You could object that sometimes people base their arguments on prin-
ciples which are not scalar. Let us suppose, for example, that someone has
been murdered, even here say, at four thirty, and that he has been stabbed to
death (a very important detail for my demonstration). The culprit is being
looked for and the police suspect a certain French linguist who is present-
ly in Ljubljana: that linguist had reasons to resent his victim, who had been
very unpleasant about the theory of argumentation in general and about
scalarity in particular; moreover, the wound could very well have been
made with the dagger which that linguist usually has in his luggage. At that
moment of the inquiry, a new piece of information reaches the police: the
information that at four thirty, the time of the crime, the French linguist
was at his hotel and obviously could not have stabbed someone here. In vir-
tue of the following argument, he is found not guilty: “It cannot be him, as
he was at his hotel at four thirty”. Such an example does seem to show that
the principles which arguments rest upon are not necessarily scalar. In that
case, the argument rests on a principle according to which When a person
is not in a place, he cannot do anything there, and there seems to be nothing
scalar about that principle at all.
Up to me then to show you now that there is something scalar in the ar-
gument in question. We are going to stick to the same situation. Well, the
police have just received the information that at four thirty, the linguist was
at his hotel. Then, all of a sudden, some more information reaches them ac-
