Tuesday 5 March 2013

When is a puzzle not a puzzle?

Tea Break

I shared the Christie article with my friends for fun, thinking that my voice and love of mysteries would be recognised in the opening sentence:
"Sometimes, I try to read novels in which solving a mystery is not the driving force propelling the reader forward. This can occasionally be OK – if there's enough relationship intrigue of the betrayal-and-adultery ilk – but generally I prefer novels that make me desperate to find out who did what and why."
However, being a philosopher, one read the article and decided that he did not agree with the argument presented. Apparently the writer has deployed the fallacy of the undistributed middle to conflate two distinct types of puzzles. To begin she appears to propose that puzzles are better than psychological insight, but then seems self-contradictory when she attempts to equate them in her other two paragraphs.

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