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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
David Rosen has written a detailed critique of my essay, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, which appeared in a recent issue of this journal. I am grateful to him for his interest in what I had to say there. But at the same time I fear that he has misconstrued it. The result is that he has set up a parade of straw men which (not surprisingly) he has knocked – indeed bludgeoned – to the turf. There are a lot of straw men standing in for a lot of real ones, some of the real ones more important than others. It would be a bore for me as well as for my readers were I to run through them all (and if I tried, the vigilant editors of the journal would, quite rightly, put a stop to my profligacy). So I am going to concentrate on a very few of what I take to be the most important ones, and ones that cluster around the same basic issue. In the process, I hope not only to perform the negative task of refuting Rosen's ‘refutation’, but the positive one of pushing my project forward, at least to the extent of clarifying it.
1 Rosen, David, ‘Cone's and Kivy's “World of Opera”’, this journal, 4 (1992), 61–74.Google Scholar
2 Kivy, Peter, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, this journal, 3 (1991), 63–77.Google Scholar
3 The childish truculence of the ‘Q.E.D.’ requires no further comment.
4 The paradigm ‘inductive’ argument is usually given as something like this: ‘This raven is black, that raven is black, the other raven is black … therefore all ravens are black.’ Of course there are other kinds of ‘empirical’ argument that might also be termed ‘inductive’. (I assume Rosen is not thinking here of mathematical induction.)