some steps are rational; some steps stumble
Logical dance among the short-pants set looks like a line-dance hop-scotch of overlapping transformation. So trivially true as to hardly be worth stating—which we didn’t. We danced it. Sidewalk syllogisms accompanied by schoolyard chant or beat-box mouthings.
| Land on both feet | A or B |
| Lift one foot | not A, so B |
| Hop, land heel-to-toe | if B, then B or C |
Yet from propositional beginnings come troupes performing calculus so paradoxical there is no believing without seeing. Choregraphers and logicians produce elegant theorems of modal movement. Now, an evening at the bandshell fills with chamber music to the tapwork of an indecidability theorem.
I have worked out a few fallacies, myself. At least, I’ve stumbled along the sidewalk back to my brownstone. It’s easier to show wonky thinking since a mistake is a mis-step and I am given to a few of both. Hardly the Inductive Olympics, but no less a kinesthetic to which I sometimes chant or mouth a bit of beat-box.
“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” — Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, 1918
