The fictional private eye has never been all that realistic: he or she’s always been a crystallization of the times, doing things the hard and painful way when more effective ways exist. The key to the success of the PI in the public imagination is the nature of those more effective ways, and public doubt in them.
If you missed the first two parts, they can be found here: (Part I, Part II) At some point I’ll put together an index page. Two Dimensions of Argument In the previous two parts, I first argued that you can divide arguments in stories up according to whether they try to argue a specific point […]
In my previous post on argument, I talked about what I saw as one basic division in story arguments. I suggested that there were two basic kinds of arguments being made in fiction: where there is a point being put forward, and where the story is being used to explore multiple sides of an argument […]
I recently finished David Zarefsky’s audio course on argumentation and reasoning. (Yes, I buy things out of mail-order catalogs. Leave me alone.) In that course he went into great detail in explaining how arguments work, what kinds of arguments we come across, how they succeed and fail. Many of these aspects of making and responding to […]
To commemorate the starting of This Here Blog, I thought I would go back and dig up an essay I wrote last year, looking at the doctrine of Fair Play, and looking at how it can be applied to science fiction. I went through and spruced it up, cut some dead weight, and added some […]
John P. Murphy 