August 11, 2021

“Hobgoblins of Little Minds”

As promised a few months back, this is an introduction to a newsletter that I’m willing to write should there be enough interested readers for it. The name is, of course, stolen from Emerson. But I also intend to wrangle with his quote.

“Reading, Reconsidered” has been about reading, and while reasoning is fundamentally interrelated with reading comprehension, it’s not quite a natural subject to interweave directly into a newsletter on reading. Reasoning is also harder subject matter to write about—especially because various reading modes include quite lighthearted fare whereas reasoning rarely allows for such release. (Well, it might allow for such release just as frequently, but it requires a bit more attentiveness to catch it.)

“Hobgoblins of Little Minds” would focus primarily on reasoning models that can be applied in the real world. A little bit of logical fallacies (but not, like, logic-bro style), informal logic more generally, and a truckload of argumentation theory. Some other aspects of reasoning would certainly come into play, including an assortment of engaging quotations. Put more narrowly, you can expect quite a bit of writing on dialogue theory (promise it’s quite applicable to everyday reasoning) and everyone’s favorite term from this newsletter, the defeasible.

Why not write this as a book instead? Several reasons, but among them is that I want subscribers to be able to ask clarifying questions as we go along. Another is that paid subscribers will get access to some of my incipient or inchoate thoughts, in a most humble echo of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. I think that such half-baked thoughts are often where the real meat is for fellow reasoners, but I’m not willing to commit such thoughts to a book.

I’ve spent over a decade investigating argumentation theory, so my approach is intended to partly reflect this sentiment:

The point of this site is to help folks get some mileage out of some books and articles that might be a chore to read by themselves. The topics that the books and articles this site will cover are about are important, too important to abandon to the few nerds with the time, training, or inclination to pore over academic writing all day. Everybody should be able to understand and participate as peers in conversations that reference these works.

I thought about titling this potential series “Reasoning for the Rest of Us” but didn’t because that seemed to imply that philosophers had their reasoning, scientists their reasoning, academics their reasoning, and then there’s the crap left over for the rest of us. The other option would be for me to place myself as a standalone guru who alone has the insights on reasoning, which would be a claptrap claim of the highest order of crankiness. I’m not a guru or any of the rest. And so I didn’t choose that as the working title since it had implications I didn’t like—while different disciplines certainly assemble different reasoning methodologies, there is overlap. And reasoning distinct to an individual discipline or broader intellectual terrain can still be useful to those outside that terrain.

I also chose “Hobgoblins of Little Minds” because it makes me chuckle, which is my usual method of selecting titles.

A note about that quoted excerpt from above: I would be offering original research or speculation alongside of the summative and quotative aspects of the newsletter. That is, I’ll be getting into the usefully interesting weeds of the defeasible and dialogue frameworks. Ideally, my writing still won’t be a chore. You can decide from my reading newsletter whether that’s possible.

My goal is to avoid aimless versions like this. (I learned more from this peppy pop song about hypotheticals than I ever did from that purposeless and audience-less blog post from an eminent logician. Plus the peppy song has an official video that is perfectly weird.) My goal will be to avoid writing down to “normals” in such a way that what I’ve written loses any real purpose and usefulness. My goal will be to write “up” to my audience, assuming that my readers are intelligent people up for an adventure in areas of argumentation theory that are pertinent to their lives (and maybe a few that aren’t especially pertinent because reasoning can be fun).

(A reason I despise pieces like that above is that novice readers of them frequently have one of two reactions. Either they assume with great obeisance that they are too lowly to understand such great thoughts, or they assume, quite wrongly, that they’ve somehow understood some great thought and that they, too, are made of the stuff of great thinkers. And yet that piece comports between nothing and little. To something of my own amusement, a well-regarded early career philosopher noted the same to me in passing, but would not state so publicly because “they’d like a job in the profession.” As I have no desire to be a philosopher or be an academic more generally, I’m more than happy to call out bad writing as bad writing, no matter how prominent the writer. I don’t know why the above author so badly missed his mark, but he does. It’s especially meandering at its close: What is the point of the piece? What is our takeaway? Where is its depth? It’s just an inconclusive ending to a piece that opens with a narrow question that itself isn’t addressed in a way that fruitfully leads to more investigation. And that’s a mismatch on a number of levels from what one would expect of a master logician.)

There are other newsletters out there that explore a somewhat similar area to what I’m proposing. Indeed, here’s one that asks an important question that might be turned on me in having the temerity to write a newsletter on reasoning: “What makes you credible and how do you decide when to grant credibility to others?” While I don’t actually subscribe to that newsletter, each piece is of the brief nature that I think most writing would be better adapted towards. Here’s another fun one on scientists functioning like priests. You might find that newsletter one that meets your interest. (If you want to know why it doesn’t meet mine, feel free to email me.) I’ll note, by the way, that I have answered the above question before, at least partly. (That I wrote that piece before reading The Great Endarkenment is striking to me now, though it really shouldn’t be.)

So what will the weakly curious subscriber receive?

Between three and twelve essays per year. Some longform, some brief.

And what will paid subscribers receive?

No more than two postings per week, and that would be a higher week’s output.

Paid subscribers will receive a smattering of the following:

Deep dives on specific themes (say, arguments from analogy)

Book reviews

Quotations on reasoning from some seriously stray resources (I’ve got one from Hilary Mantel all lined up)

Follow-ups to reader questions

Speculative pieces

Argument analysis in the wild

Other odds and ends related to reasoning as the spirit moves (This is what more salesy folk describe as “exclusive content”. Since “content” is a rather vacuous category, I’ll spare you the pitch)

Why am I doing this as a paid option?

Well, it’s primarily because such writing is seriously hard work. And the books I need to research from ain’t free. It’s also because readers who pay for things are more likely to actually read them. And so if you’re paying the equivalent of buying me a cup of coffee a month, you’ll value that caffeinated chat a little more.

It’s also because I am willing to do the newsletter if others see it as possessing something worth adding to their well-stuffed lives. It’s a tiny bit of friction to help you decide if it’s something you really, truly want in your world. It’s obviously something I want in my world: I’ve already done much reading and teaching in this area. But I don’t need to share this part of my world with others if they can’t find a place for such material themselves. It’s that simple.

Why so few postings?

It’s largely because of the reality explored in this recent piece from New York Magazine:

Consumers of digital media now find themselves in a newsletter deluge.

Yes, it’s already terrible. And now observe what the deluge actually does:

But in order to write about newsletters, I binged. I went about subscribing in a way no sentient reader was likely to do — omnivorously, promiscuously, heedless of redundancy, completely open to hate-reading. I had not expected to like everything I received. Still, as the flood continued, I experienced a response I did not expect. I was bored.

Too many postings begets boredom. Too many postings about thinking drives out thinking. One sturdy piece a month should be one you can return to and play around with, maybe for just that one read, maybe for months on end. My goal isn’t a volume game: I’m not analyzing the news. My goal is to provide thoughtful pieces that can be reflected upon, or saved up for a break for those amongst my many student readers.

It’s a different approach. Whether enough others think as I do, that the pathway to counter the “Informational Man” isn’t more content but carefully considered material, is a question you’ll have to answer for yourself. But my hope is that by offering fewer postings that readers will be able to more adeptly adapt and put into practice what they read.

Will there be spicy pieces?

Well, if you’d like to see my take on neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s Weaponized Lies, this is one way to drag that out of me. So in answer to the question, yes. But the focus won’t be on that type of piece.

Will there be more pieces on critical thinking?

I’ve probably already said all that I’m inclined to say on that term, but I might be persuaded if there’s an audience I’m unaware of that is deeply desirous of more of the same.

Who’s your target audience?

Just as I think philosophy is for everyone and hard books are for everyone, I think reasoning is for everyone. But I wouldn’t suggest younger than high school.

How many paid subscribers will it take?

If there are at least ten such noble souls in the world, I’ll do it. So if you’re interested, pester nine friends into also doing a paid subscription and then you can consider yourself a patron of the arts and the lucky reader of philosophical reasoning that can placed straight into your veins. (This last might be a touch of hyperbole, but the suggestion of persuading nine friends to also subscribe is not.)

Does this have anything to do with “Reading, Reconsidered”?

Aside from the same author and the occasional team-up, nope.

But will there be footnotes? ¹

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A thing that I’ve observed over the years is that while, yes, what Elijah Millgram observes in The Great Endarkment is true of many a philosopher—that their tools aren’t really intended for the practical world—it isn’t even remotely the case for all. (I’d be inclined to say Millgram’s observation is true of most philosophers, but that’s a larger sampling than I can or am willing to make. The practical blindness Millgram describes is seen especially among those he calls the hyperspecializers—the narrow nerds who haven’t read a book outside their sub-sub-speciality in years.) The philosophers that are informed by a variety of bits from the historical tradition are, contra Millgram, quite adapted in everyday life with their philosophical tools. They come about them from a different angle than I’ve encountered in argumentation theory, for example, but that angle is at least as rich (often richer) and arrives at the same sort of implementation even if the terms and framework are ostensibly different.

(For those familiar with The Great Endarkenment, yes, there is a distinction between his serial hyperspecializers and most contemporary philosophers. But while my envisioned Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle, quite a few of those well-steeped in the history of philosophy are either serial hyperspecializers themselves or adaptable enough to account for the role Millgram thinks contemporary philosophers should take on.)

I note all of this to emphasize that while what I’ll be working with will occasionally be “contemporary” insights from argumentation theory (also from what’s sometimes half-jokingly called Canadian philosophy), many of these insights can be found strewn throughout intellectual history, perhaps with different emphases. Thus, even though much of argumentation theory is, I think, more readily accessible to a general audience—or at least its somewhat less expansive nature lends itself to more ready adoption—its insights are not necessarily unique. Put another way and to emphasize a point I made earlier, I’m not placing myself against the historical traditions or as offering something unknown to humankind before the dawn of (my writing) time.

I am suggesting that for those less inclined to sift through that tradition, at least over the next couple of years, or those who’d like to see some contemporary research in action, “Hobgoblins of Little Minds” would prove worthwhile. That’s about the sum of my boast. Whether there are at least ten souls who find themselves so inclined to reason a bit more alongside me—that’s up to you.

Happy pondering,

Kreigh

P.S. Email me if you’re interested in the free or paid version. If I’ve received at least ten emails interested in the $5-a-month paid version, I’ll get it all set up to start either next month or October, depending on how much lead time I need for some of the editing on the initial pieces.

P.P.S As a reminder, “Hobgoblins of Little Minds” won’t determine the ongoing nature of “Reading, Reconsidered”. This once-a-month newsletter will continue on for the foreseeable future independent of “Hobgoblins of Little Minds”. And yes, I do have the intellectual space to write two newsletters simultaneously!

P.P.P.S. For those wondering where I fall on the intellectual map—that is, for the category obsessed—perhaps Edward Tenner’s divisions will serve as a working outline of “what could be called the folk humanities, enthusiast humanities, and academic humanities.” While I don’t consider myself in the humanities (and thus fulfilling the prediction of his very next sentence), you could place me among the enthusiasts, at least when it comes to argumentation theory. I’m well aware of the tradition of “religious enthusiasts,” which is among the reasons I don’t especially embrace Tenner’s terms. But in many ways, I am an enthusiast for argumentation theory and the like. Tenner invests more nuance in the term “enthusiast” then you or I might, and so you might read his essay if you’re intrigued by the term and whether you wish to read more from an enthusiast. For what it’s worth, if you’ve been a regular reader of my newsletter on reading, you’ve already been doing so.