A wise man once wrote “If you can mimic my dispositions then you know what I really meant.” If you believe this wise man, you won’t want to know that his name is Don Arthur, that he wrote this sentence yesterday, and that it occurs in the course of
an argument against my claim that, if you want to assess the arguments of a political philosopher, it’s frequently necessary to consider their entire body of work, including the political inferences they drew from their theories. But as I read him, Don wants to argue that a sentence is a sentence is a sentence. At least some bloggers seem to agree, posting what appear to me to be random collections of sentences. But despite his oracular ambiguity, it seems to me that Don’s sentences benefit from their proximity to each other, and from the fact that I can read them in the expectation that they are intended as a coherent argument rather than as isolated propositions.