Realist Magic Liveblog 13

I had an insight this morning. It was about writing philosophy books. I was surprised to discover myself writing them starting with Ecology without Nature, but I guess it's what I love to do.

Now Realist Magic was a deliberately planned philosophy book from the get go. And what I realized is that your sense of your audience causes you to want to write as rigorously as possible. Of course there has to be rigor and good arguments. But you can easily become defensive. This can lead you to become brittle. Which can lead to your arguments being easier to snap, ironically.

It's living proof that there is no metalanguage. The more you hedge your argument about with defenses, the more enmeshed in a brittle structure you become. I can see how easily it happens and I can see how it works in some of the Analytic books I'm reading right now. Soon there is no breathing room.