A striking thing about language is that is composable in certain ways. I can make an argument in which each step of the argument is self-evident, yet the conclusion is a surprising (but true) consequence of the premises.
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In essence, it's a visual argument, each step of which seems correct, and yet it arrives at an impossible conclusion.
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I wonder: is there a linguistic equivalent to Ascending and Descending? An argument of which each step is true, yet the conclusion does not follow from the premise?
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I've found it surprisingly tricky to unpack what's going on. In the case of Ascending and Descending part of the trouble is that our mind is solving an inverse inference problem to recover 3d geometry from a 2d projection. It's tempting to think that's the trouble.
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But we do similar kinds of inverse inference all the time with language.
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Perhaps the best analogue is jokes, which often rely on the same kind of multiple inverse inferences about the meaning of words.
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Or certain kinds of cognitive bias - like the Group Attribution Error - which also rely on faulty inverse inference.
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A lot of famous current speakers employ this technique - whole isn't sum of its part - where semantic islands make sense, but altogether it's nonsense. To help your priors not freak out, they employ clever transitions.
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I've noticed this too. It's often easier to detect in writing.
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I once tried to look up any Latin word from field of rhetoric re: "good conclusion from wrong arguments", but couldn't find one (asked ppl too) -- so I named it "the Bill Maher effect". Sorry Bill.
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Paradox?
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If by "true" you mean valid, then no, it's definitional on validity that it be transitive. But there are def. apparently valid arguments, they're called paradoxes--a classic example would be sorites paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox …
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