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  1. Mar 2019
    1. Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative. Truth once created in this way becomes referential, as in legal precedent. The court decides "what real-ly happened" and we then measure against that. The Strong Defense implies a figure/ground shift between philosophy and rhetoric-in fact, as we shall see, a continued series of shifts. In its world, there is as much truth as we need, maybe more, but argument is open-ended, more like kiting checks than balancing books. Much as we want to evade it, howeve

      Law creates rhetoric, or rhetoric creates law? Philosophy of law generally presupposed that law is objective. Lanham's argument makes a good case that law presents itself as objective, even though it can't possibly ever be.