Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
I think that is taking the analogy a bit far. The issue as I see it is knowledge centric hubris. The equivalent is that "You know Boyd and I know Clausewitz therefore you know nothing of importance". As pointed out to me many times, which translation of Clausewitz, what about Sun Tzu, Clausewitz is better considered and adapted versus applied strictly and all the rest of what I've called "The Clausewitz Caveats". Yet that intellectual honesty is not being attributed in several posts here toward Boyd.

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Unless the council is not capable of holding two or more competing concepts in their minds and weighing each on its merits without having to decry one or the others as foul for failure in cognitive intelligence. I'll hold up Clausewitz, Fochs, Liddel-Hart, Boyd, Sun-Tzu and others while I compare and contrast and accept what I can use and still not have to make any of them justify their existence. I don't have to reject all others to accept one. That is what the discussion appears to be leading towards. Rather than trying to discuss why it appears to be trending towards justify.
This guy named Donald Davidson makes what I think is a very interesting point in an essay entitled "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." He suggests that we actually do a lot of "charitable" interpretation--that is, we presume that we understand what the other person holds for beliefs, etc. when they say things. We then engage in a give and take that allows us to reach some consensus position of understanding. I think that is what happened in the Squad threads.

It seems that a little less charity is being expressed in the various threads about Boyd, OODA, MW, etc. My take on this is that the acrimony in a debate varies inversely to the stakes/outcome of the debate. IOW, lots of folks have a lot of "skin" invested in the expanatory power of Boyd, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, etc, but the cash value of that "skin" is actually quite small. On a day-to-day, non-academic basis, having one of them be more right really doesn't amount to much in how successfully we get along in the world of prosecuting warfare at the tactical level.