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Rich Rostrom's avatar

All the other features of writing that can’t be as easily transferred, I call “style”. Readers may enjoy and admire the styles of things they read, but they can’t as easily add those styles to their own writing.

There have been many writers whose styles were very influential or even widely imitated. H. L. was a public intellectual with a host of imitators.

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Haydn Thomas-Rose's avatar

I agree (assuming plagiarism is ruled out). But the point at issue is whether when you say the "content" of Tao's writing, you are referring to the part of Tao's writing that is easily transferred. This doesn't mean easy to create / discover. Plots are easily transferred / summarized, so this predicts that we'd call plot the content of fiction - which seems true, and only now do I realize this is a problem for the "substantive empirical consequences" theory of content.

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