Thanks very much for your response, Tim. I appreciate the nuances of your claims, but I disagree with your contention that the statement under consideration is specious. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘specious’ as:
- “Plausible, apparently sound or convincing, but in reality sophistical or fallacious”; and
- “Fair, attractive, or plausible, but wanting in genuineness or sincerity.”
In my opinion, neither of these definitions accurately describes the nature of my claim that “world-class thinking produces world-class writing.” The statement is true, as you yourself implicitly admit via your claim that world-class thinking is a necessary condition for world-class writing. If it’s impossible for world-class writing to emerge in the absence of world-class thinking, it cannot be the case that my assertion is specious, i.e., sophistical, fallacious, or lacking in genuineness or sincerity. The assertion is incomplete insofar as world-class writing is the product of more than world-class thinking (re: the sufficiency versus necessity distinction), but its incompleteness doesn’t make it untrue or only apparently correct.
