Glossary
Terms of art
Every term of art the site uses, collected in one place — including the three different “closures,” disambiguated.
- Assumptive close
- The sales technique of speaking as if the purchase decision has already been made (“Will that be cash or card?”), so only downstream details remain discussable. The small version, taught by name: a presupposed frame with a script and a court-priced record. Sales stops there; it does not reclassify the customer who says no. In the wild →
- Begging the question (petitio principii)
- Assuming what you were supposed to prove — placing the conclusion among the premises. Aristotle catalogues it in the Prior Analytics (II.16); the English phrase is recorded from 1581. For most speakers today the phrase means “raises the question”; the old sense survives mainly in the Latin. The site’s stage 3, the presupposed frame, is this move, and the assumptive close is its scripted form. Other routes to closure disqualify evidence or apply asymmetric standards without using a presupposition. Old names →
- Presupposition
- What a sentence presents as background rather than its main assertion. “Have you stopped X?” presupposes you were X-ing. A hearer can understand that structure and still reject the premise. (Stalnaker 1973.)
- Accommodation
- The common conversational move of letting a presupposition enter the working common ground so an exchange can continue. Accommodation is defeasible: a hearer can stop and challenge the premise, usually with extra conversational effort. (Lewis 1979, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game.”)
- Common ground
- The set of propositions conversational participants mutually take for granted. Frames are installed by getting propositions here without argument. (Stalnaker 2002.)
- Warrant
- In Toulmin’s (1958) argument model: the unstated inference license connecting grounds to claim. Closure lives in warrants because warrants are absorbed, not asserted.
- Discursive closure
- Deetz (1992): the suppression of potential conflict in communication — moves by which questions, framings, and participants are removed from discussion so a preferred reality stands without defeating rivals. This site’s title concept, used in a narrower operational sense: a claim is closed when an adverse check produces not revision but the reclassification of the checker. Backgrounding a premise (see Presupposition, Accommodation) is the small version.
- Self-sealing
- The plain-English name for the big version: a claim so arranged that every check which could count against it is disqualified by the claim itself. Wins confirm it; losses prove the referees were corrupt. The word describes the structure, not the truth of the claim.
- Poisoning the well
- Discrediting a source in advance so that anything it later says is discounted unheard. Named by Newman (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1864) of Kingsley’s attempt “to poison by anticipation the public mind against me.” The site’s referee removal (D2) and moral recategorization (D7) are the move applied to every possible checker.
- No true Scotsman
- Rescuing a generalization from a counterexample by redefining the category to exclude it. Named by Flew (God and Philosophy, 1966; Thinking About Thinking, 1975): the claim is “transformed while you wait into an impotent tautology.” The site’s definition is No true Scotsman aimed at the referees instead of the counterexamples. Old names →
- Kettle logic
- Defending a position with arguments that cannot all be true: the kettle was returned undamaged, it was already damaged when borrowed, and it was never borrowed. Freud’s example (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900); the label is Derrida’s. The expandable mechanism of the 2020 case (mail ballots, machines, noncitizens) has this shape.
- Epistemic closure (colloquial)
- Julian Sanchez’s 2010 usage: self-sealing media ecosystems in which all trusted sources point inward. Distinct from Deetz’s term and from the epistemology term below.
- Closure (epistemology)
- The technical thesis that knowledge is closed under known entailment — if you know p, and know p entails q, you know q. Unrelated to the other two “closures”; disambiguated here to keep the record clean.
- Overton window
- The range of positions a public will tolerate hearing voiced; developed by Joseph Overton at the Mackinac Center in the mid-1990s and named for him after his death in 2003. It concerns answers, and it moves over years. Closure works one level up and one conversation at a time: it sets which questions may be asked, and a question removed from the window leaves no vacancy to campaign for. How it works →
- Paralipsis
- Saying a thing while claiming not to say it (“I’m not saying; I’m just saying”). Mercieca (2020) documents it as a signature device of the primary corpus.
- Ad baculum
- Argument by threat — assent motivated by consequences, not evidence. (Mercieca 2020, ch. 10.)
- Ad populum
- Argument from popularity — the crowd’s belief as evidence. See D3, where circulation substitutes for proof.
- Reification
- Treating an abstraction as a concrete thing — a contestable arrangement presented as an object that simply exists. One of Deetz’s naturalization routes.
- New conspiracism
- Rosenblum & Muirhead (2019): conspiracy without the theory — bare assertion (“rigged!”) carrying no explanatory account and inviting no verification. D3’s definitive treatment.
- Firehose of falsehood
- Paul & Matthews (2016, RAND): a propaganda model — high-volume, multichannel, rapid, shameless about consistency — in which volume and repetition beat credibility.
- Gish gallop
- Overwhelming an interlocutor with more claims than can be rebutted in the time available. Term coined by Eugenie Scott.
- Brandolini’s law
- The aphorism (2013 coinage, labeled as such, not a finding) that refuting bullshit takes an order of magnitude more energy than producing it.
- Illusory truth effect
- Repetition increases felt truth (Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino 1977), even against prior knowledge (Fazio et al. 2015).
- Continued influence effect
- Corrected misinformation continues shaping inference after correction. (Lewandowsky et al. 2012.)
- Identity fusion
- Swann et al. (2012): a felt merger of self and group in which group threats register as personal attacks. The substrate of D8 and D1.
- Identity-protective cognition
- Kahan et al.: reasoning in the service of group belonging when facts threaten identity; numeracy can increase polarization on identity-charged items.
- Sacred value
- Tetlock (2003): a value whose holders treat trade-offs against it as taboo — cost-benefit questions register as offers to sin.
- Deep story
- Hochschild (2016): the felt narrative beneath political allegiance, true to emotion if not to ledger. Cited respectfully; grievances are data here, not error.
- Empty signifier
- Laclau (2005): the leader-symbol vague enough to unify heterogeneous demands. Depth-block material for D8.
- Plausible deniability
- Deetz’s meaning denial: a meaning conveyed and simultaneously disowned. D6 is its retroactive form; D3 its prospective form.
- Forbidden question [our coinage]
- the specific empirical or moral question a construction renders locally unaskable: not prohibited, but priced, because asking it now marks the asker as enemy, dupe, or bore.
- Heads-I-win prior [our coinage]
- a pre-committed interpretation under which no adverse outcome can count as evidence against the speaker. See D5.